This is unseasonably late, but I really didn’t want to leave it until Christmas 2024!

Santa Claus Gets Busy

This was first published in the Sunday Graphic in 1947, and the illustrations were uncredited. It was then reprinted in Enid Blyton’s Bright Story Book in 1952 with illustrations by Eileen Soper. It has also appeared in Enid Blyton’s Ruby Storybook (1980), and two editions of The Little Brown Bear and Other Stories (1985 and 2004).

There is another short story with the same title, first found in Sunny Stories and reprinted in the Tenth Holiday Book and the Purnell Holiday Book, and also a Wheaton musical play from 1939.

Unlike in The Little Reindeer Bell, all of Santa’s reindeer are ill, not just one. They are sneezing their heads off. Santa is, naturally, dismissive of the suggestion that he should use a helicopter, and instead telephones London Zoo to ask about borrowing some reindeer for the night. The zoo keeper is understandably suspicious until Santa looks up his name in his book (conveniently there is only one John Robins in the world) and can tell him what he got for Christmas 25 years ago.

As the zoos reindeer are of the hooves-firmly-on-the-ground kind he asks the zoo keeper to whisper annimaloolipatahmakaroo in their ears and to put fly-paint on their hooves. Problem solved!

Not much to say about the changes as there are barely any.

A correction is made as Zoo is always capitalised in the original, but it doesn’t need to be.

Oddly a hyphen is inserted into the magic word (annimal-oolipatahmakaroo), but only the first time it is used. I can only imagine that the word had been wrapped across two lines with a hyphen inserted, but the page was reformatted, moving the word onto one line but leaving the hyphen.

A Family Christmas Part Eleven: Christmas Day

This is a very short chapter, barely three pages.

Despite their late night the children are awake at 7am – isn’t that always the way, though? They are not expecting anything in their stockings as they saw Santa Claus fly off without filling them. But to their delight they are full of lovely things.

Blyton more lists than describes the day – Mother takes a piece of the Yule log for next year. Daddy lights the brandy pudding on fire and Ann gets the silver thimble, while the other children get threepenny bits. They light the Christmas tree candles in the evening.

It ends with Blyton’s common tactic of speaking directly to the reader. Ann declares she loves Christmas even more now she’s learned so much about it, and wishes someone would put it all into a book.

So I have—and here it is. And now we must leave Ann and her family with the lighted Christmas tree. The candles are almost burnt down. Christmas is nearly over. But it will come again with all its love and kindliness, the birthday of the little Jesus born so many hundreds of years ago, and we will say once more, with the angels,
“GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGHEST; AND ON EARTH PEACE, GOODWILL TOWARDS MEN!”

As it is a short chapter there was not much to change.

The opening quote was

So now is come our joyfullest feast;
Let every man be jolly.
– George Wither

These are the opening lines of his poem A Christmas Carol.

Two expected changes first, queer to strange and Mother twice to Mummy (still inconsistently, though.)

Instead of threepenny bits the children find silver coins in the Christmas pudding.

Dreamt is changed to dreamed, and the fairy who looked down smilingly now looked down smiling.

I think it’s slightly odd, actually, that they didn’t use this as the last chapter of the book Blyton’s message to the reader has a certain air of finality to it.

The Christmas Tree Fairy

This one was a bit of a mystery to me. The acknowledgements credit this story as coming from The Enid Blyton Holiday Book, information which is repeated in the Cave. However, when I finally picked that up it’s not the same story at all. The story in The Holiday Book is about Dame Trit-Trot who gives a real-life fairy to her granddaughter Jane, but everyone else thinks it’s just a doll.

The story in the new collection is quite different. It is about a tiny tree which worries it will never be bought (so similar to The Tiny Christmas Tree from earlier in the book). This one’s not bought, but instead taken home by the woodman and decorated for his children, then planted in their garden for the next year. It does not mention fairies at any point, leading me to believe that they’ve put the wrong name and acknowledgement in the book.

I have found the story in the Cave of Books after a lot of searching. It was titled The Little Christmas Tree Brought Joy (or The Little Christmas Tree) and appeared in The Sunday Mail on December 24, 1944. It was illustrated by Frank McKenna and later appeared in The Big Bedtime Book (1951).

Very sloppy work, Hodder.

And just like that, I’m finally done with this series.