Christmas is the one gift occasion where the deadline matters more than the choice. A made-to-order book is not a shelf product - your copy does not exist until you order it - so the single most useful thing this guide can give you is a date. Approve your book by 17 December for a United Kingdom address, or 13 December inside the United States, and you are comfortable. After that, the digital edition still arrives on time, because it arrives immediately.
With that out of the way, the choosing part is easier than it looks. There are fifty-four stories, and you do not need to read fifty-four descriptions. You need one sentence about the child.
Start from what they are into right now
A four-year-old deep in a dinosaur phase does not care that the plot is gentle. They care that there are dinosaurs and that their own face is in the book. The same goes for space, mermaids, dragons, football, cooking, trains. If the child has one loud obsession this year, take it - and take it precisely, because part of what makes the book worth keeping is that it fixes what they were into the Christmas it was given.
Or start from something that is actually happening
A milestone lands harder than an interest, because the child recognises the situation as well as the face. A new sibling arriving in the spring, a first term at school just finished, a tooth lost in November, a year of being frightened of the dark that they have just grown out of. These are the books that get read at bedtime in March, not just on Christmas morning.
If you barely know the child
It happens - a colleague's new baby, a great-niece you have met twice. Choose a bedtime story. Bedtime is universal, it does not depend on knowing this year's obsession, and it is the story most likely to be re-read. You do not need to filter by age either: the reading level is set from the age you enter, so the same story is written with shorter sentences for a three-year-old than for a seven-year-old.
Buying for more than one child
It is a book each, and that is not an upsell. Every story is built around a single face, because a single face is the only thing an illustration can hold steady across twelve chapters - ask it to hold two and it starts blending them. For twins we would pick two different stories rather than the same one twice, so they have something to trade. Order them in one checkout and the shipping is charged for the parcel rather than per book.
The Christmas dates, in one place
- United Kingdom - approve by 17 December. Six days, printed in the UK, on a domestic courier.
- United States - approve by 13 December. Nine to ten days, printed in the US.
- Germany - approve by 15 December. Six to eight days, printed in Germany.
- Ireland - approve by 9 December. Nine to fourteen days, so this is the one to start early.
- Missed it? The digital edition unlocks the moment you approve it, and you can add the printed keepsake in January.
One thing worth knowing about that clock: it starts when you approve your book, not when you pay. After you buy, we build the whole thing and send it to you to read - every chapter, every illustration - and nothing goes to the printer until you say yes. The time you spend reviewing is yours, not ours, which is why the dates above have a margin built in.
A note on December post
Late December is the slowest postal fortnight of the year everywhere. The dates above already work back from the slow end of our delivery window rather than the optimistic end, because a gift that arrives on 26 December is not a gift. If you are reading this in the second week of December and the date has gone, take the digital edition rather than gambling - it is the same story and the same pictures.
