Meerkat Christmas by Emily Gravett

Meerkat Christmas by Emily Gravett
Published October 2019 Pan MacMillan

Blurb:

A young meerkat travels the world looking for Christmas in this festive card-packed picture book, perfect for fans of The Jolly Christmas Postman and the modern classic, Meerkat Mail. 
Sunny isn't quite sure if Christmas in the desert with his meerkat family is the right sort of Christmas – there's no snow, no fir trees and no figgy pudding! So he heads off on a journey round the world looking for the picture perfect Christmas . . . before realizing he might have left it at home after all.

The Christmas Pageant is on today in Adelaide, so that means the countdown to Christmas is on.

What better way to get into the Christmas spirit than with our favourite meerkat, Sunny. Who you may remember from the earlier picture book Meerkat Mail.

Christmas is coming, and Sunny has found a checklist in a magazine, Perfect Magazine Xmas Extra outlining what it takes to make a perfect Christmas:

• The Perfect Weather
• The Perfect Tree
• The Perfect Presents
• The Perfect Dinner
• The Perfect Music

Thinking that he can't possible have a perfect Christmas in his Kalahari home he sets off around the globe, hoping to find a place that ticks all of the boxes.

We get to travel the world with Sunny, and he sends Christmas cards back to his family from each destination.  The text never states exactly where Sunny is, but there are clues in the cards, or in the illustrations, and young readers will love to guess where Sunny might be.  You might even want to get out the atlas or a globe to track Sunny's trip.

The first one is pretty easy, (well I can say that being from Australia)...at the beach, hot, prawns on the barbie AND there's a koala!

All of the cards open up (as you can see below), kids will love it, and unlike the every popular Jolly Postman, these cards are stuck down, so they can be opened, but won't get lost.  There's even a Christmas Cracker joke in every card.