This story takes about six minutes to read aloud and suits children aged four to seven.

In the workshop at the North Pole, the paint would not dry.

It had never happened before. Every toy that came off the shelves needed a coat of paint at the end, red for the fire engines, blue for the boats, gold for the trumpets, and by morning the paint was always dry and hard and ready for wrapping. But this year, three days before Christmas Eve, the paint sat wet on every toy in the finishing room, as glossy and soft as the moment it went on.

Mrs Claus ran a finger along a rocking horse and it came away red.

"Try a fan," said one of the elves, and they brought in the biggest fan they could find and pointed it at the paint. The paint rippled but did not dry. They brought in more fans, six of them, then ten, until the finishing room sounded like the inside of a ship, and still the paint sat wet and shining on every toy.

"Try the ovens," said another elf, and they moved the toys to the big ovens where the gingerbread was baked, and turned the heat up low so nothing would scorch. The paint bubbled at the edges and still did not dry. They turned the heat up further. A drum began to smoke. They turned the heat off very quickly indeed.

By the second morning there were forty elves standing in the finishing room, and forty different ideas, and none of them had worked, and the toys sat in long silent rows, all of them finished, all of them wet.

Santa came down himself. He did not say anything for a while. He walked along the rows of toys, looking at the ships and the horses and the tin soldiers, all painted, all shining, all wrong.

"Nobody has asked the paint what it wants," he said, and the elves looked at each other, because that was not the kind of thing anyone had thought to try.

He picked up a small wooden bird, painted blue, and turned it over in his hands. Underneath, stamped into the wood, was a note in a hand smaller than his own: this year's paint is new, mixed from the last of the old blue and something the reindeer brought back from the south.

Santa sent for the reindeer, and Donner remembered the flowers. They had grown wild on a hillside somewhere over warmer country, bright and strange, and one of the young elves had gathered a sackful because the colour was so good, and mixed them into the paint without telling anyone the flowers were still a little alive, still opening and closing with the sun the way some flowers do. A paint made from something still alive does not know it is meant to be finished.

"Then it needs the dark," said Santa, "the same as the flowers do, to close up and rest."

They carried every toy out into the night, into the cold beneath the moon, and left them there in long silent rows under the stars, and went back inside to wait. None of the elves felt at all sure it would work, though none of them said so out loud.

In the morning the paint was dry. Every toy was hard and bright and ready, the red fire engines and the blue boats and the gold trumpets, and Mrs Claus ran her finger along the rocking horse and it came away clean.

Nobody ever did find out which hillside the flowers had grown on. The elf who had gathered them kept the last few dried petals in a matchbox, just in case they were ever needed again, and put the matchbox at the very back of a drawer in the finishing room, where it has stayed ever since.