About 6 minutes to read aloud.

The sky over the last house was not black anymore. It had gone the grey of cold ash, the kind of grey that comes an hour or so before a winter sunrise, and Santa Claus knew what that meant. He had one house left, and not much night to do it in.

The sleigh came down low over a stand of bare elms, runners hissing against the top branches, and settled onto a roof no wider than a kitchen table. The reindeer stood with their heads down, breath coming out of them in long ropes of steam. Dasher and Dancer had been quick all night. Prancer and Vixen had carried the heaviest stretch, over the hills where the wind never stopped pushing. Comet and Cupid had found every chimney in the dark without missing one, and Donner and Blitzen, who pulled at the back and felt every bump twice, were the tiredest of the eight.

"Nearly there," Santa said to them, though they knew it as well as he did. "One more."

This house was smaller than most. A single chimney, a little crooked, with smoke long since gone out of it, and one window at the front still holding a lamp that had burned all night and was down to its last inch of oil. He went down the chimney the way he always did, feet first and no hurry, and came out the other side into a room with a low ceiling and a fire reduced to orange threads in the grate.

There was a girl sitting at the bottom of the stairs. Not hiding, not creeping down for a look. Just sitting, in a coat over her nightdress, wide awake.

"You're late," she said.

"I'm last," said Santa. "There's a difference."

She thought about that. "Is it far, where you go after this?"

"Far enough that I'd better get on with it." He set down what he'd carried for her, not much, wrapped in brown paper because there hadn't been time that year for anything finer, and straightened up with the small ache in his back that came at the end of every round, every year, in the same place. "Why are you awake?"

"I wanted to see if the sky did it. Miss Ellery said it goes light from the bottom up, like water filling a jar. I wanted to watch."

Santa looked at the window. The grey had a seam of paler grey along the very bottom of it now, thin as a knife's edge. "It does do that," he said. "You've got a little while yet."

"Will you see it too? From up there?"

"I'll see it happen underneath me, most likely. That's the best way to see a sunrise, if you ever get the chance. From above, while everyone else is still asleep to it."

She nodded slowly, filing this away the way children file away the things adults say that sound like they might be true and might be a kind way of ending a conversation. Santa went back to the chimney, and stopped with one boot already in the flue.

"Go back up," he said. "Not because you have to. Because your feet are cold and the fire's out and there's no sense in a girl catching a chill to watch something the sky's going to do anyway, whether you're looking or not."

She went, without arguing, which he took as a fair trade for having answered her honestly.

Outside, the reindeer had turned themselves without being asked, facing the direction that led home, the way tired animals do when they know a journey is nearly finished. Santa climbed up, took the reins loose in his hands, and the sleigh lifted off that crooked little roof and out over the elms.

Behind him, low along the whole rim of the world, the seam of pale grey was widening. Not sunrise yet. Just the sky beginning to admit that the night was not going to last much longer, the way it always did, the way it always had.

The reindeer did not need telling to fly steady and slow. There was no house left to reach and no reason left to hurry, only the long quiet run home, north, ahead of a light that was coming up behind them mile by mile, and had not caught them yet.