The book about Santa came about because of a Christmas card our family sent out. Every year, we send out these Christmas cards and we all draw something inside the Christmas card. I think it was 1998 we all drew Santa, and I sent it to my editor, Ellen Johnston. At the time she was with Harcourt. She saw the little doodle that was next to my name of my Santa, and he was wearing sort of suspenders and he had a yo-yo. She said, “You really need to do a book about this Santa,” and I’m looking at this little inch-high doodle. I thought, “What is she seeing in this Santa?”
She kept saying it over the course of many years. I’d look at that little Santa and eventually started to think of Santa Claus. The thing that struck me about Santa was that he would be a toy expert. He had this yo-yo. I drew him with a yo-yo, and I thought he certainly knows his yo-yo tricks. I mean he would need to know a lot about toys in order to decide who wanted what. I started to think about him as a toy tester, a toy expert and that that would be kind of an amusing theme on which to do the book.
For years, I was kind of exploring that in my mind. It wasn’t quite enough. It was almost seven years after this Christmas card came out that the light bulb was — he doesn’t only need to know toys. Santa needs to know kids and then he heeds to know toys, and then he can put the kids and the toys together and that is what makes a gift from Santa so special.
That was the trilogy. Once I centered on that it was like okay this is a book about gift giving. It’s not only about Santa. It’s about how a gift works. In a similar way to the roller coaster book being about fear, that was the beating heart of what the book was. Once I had that that was the structure that the book was built on.