Nikolas

On a snowy Christmas Eve, a grandfather gathers his family around the fire and begins to tell a story. Not the story his granddaughter thinks she knows. The real one.

A long time ago, in a small Finnish village called Lampoyhteiso - which means warm community - a twelve-year-old boy named Nikolas Klaus began making wooden toys for the children around him. Not because anyone asked. Not for recognition or reward. Simply because he believed every child deserved one morning a year when something wonderful happened for no reason except that someone thought of them.

That boy became a man. The toys became a tradition. The tradition became a legend. And somewhere along the way, the legend became something so large that the man behind it was nearly lost inside it.

Nikolas: The True Story of Santa traces the quiet, human origins of every Christmas tradition we still practice today - the stockings hung by the fire, the decorated tree, the gifts exchanged between loved ones, the family gathered around a long table, the cookies left out on Christmas Eve, and the red coat walking away into the dark. Not as mythology. As the natural outgrowth of one extraordinary life lived in generous, anonymous service to others.

This is the story of where it all truly began.

Told in the warm, unhurried voice of a grandfather who knows exactly what he is doing, Nikolas moves between a modern family's Christmas Eve gathering and the deep Finnish winters of a long-ago age - building, chapter by chapter, to a closing that will make you look around the room at your own family and see something you never quite noticed before.

Perfect for reading aloud together. Beautiful as a gift for anyone who has ever loved Christmas and wondered, in their quietest moments, where it all truly came from.