A workshop is where the toys get made, and most versions of the story leave it at that: a busy room somewhere far off, full of noise and sawdust and light. This story stays with one smaller detail instead, the door into that room, and what happens to whoever is standing in front of it when it opens.

Why the door matters more than the workshop

A door is a modest thing to build a story around, but it does a particular job that the workshop itself cannot: it marks the exact point where not knowing turns into finding out. Everything before the door is imagining. Everything after it is seeing. The story is built around that single change.

Where the workshop image comes from

The idea of Santa working somewhere remote and hidden took hold in American illustration during the second half of the nineteenth century. Thomas Nast, drawing for Harper's Weekly from the 1860s onwards, placed that workshop at the North Pole and gave readers their first pictures of it: a building given over entirely to the making of toys, closed off from the rest of the world for eleven months of the year. The North Pole setting has stayed part of the tradition ever since, even where the workshop itself is imagined differently from one story to the next.

Reading it aloud

The story keeps its attention on the door, which gives a reader room to slow down at the point where the door is found. Reading Aloud Well covers pacing of this kind in more detail, for anyone reading to a group where attention spans differ.

Other stories set in the same world

The Workshop Door sits alongside The Last House and The Longest Night as separate stories, each one able to be read alone. The full list, with age ranges and read-aloud times for each, is on the stories page.