A Christmas present that can't get stuck in shipping

What having no carrier changes

In December, most gift problems are delivery problems. The item is in stock, you ordered in time, and it still sits in a depot until the 27th. Nothing physical moves here, so that whole category of risk is gone.

What replaces it is a shorter, more predictable clock that you control. The 7 business days start when your photos reach us, not when you pay. Send them the same day and the finished book lands in your inbox with time to spare.

Counting backwards in December

Business days aren't calendar days, and they aren't your business days either. We're in Japan, so the 7 days are Japanese weekdays. December 25 and 26 are ordinary working days here; the break that stops work is the one at New Year. With a weekend in the middle, 7 business days land nine to eleven days later on a calendar, and a Japanese public holiday pushes that further.

So count backwards in calendar days, leave slack rather than doing precise arithmetic, and if the date is tight, write to us before you pay instead of working it out yourself.

• Early December — the comfortable version. Order, send two or three photos that evening, and forget about it until it arrives.
• Around two weeks out — the last range that works without anyone rushing, and only if the photos go out the same day. The single most common way this runs late is a paid order with no photos attached to it.
• The last week — too late for the ordinary path, so don't just order and hope. Write to info@kater.jp first and tell us the date you need. If we can't be confident, we'll say so instead of taking the order.

If we do miss 7 business days, you get a full refund without having to ask for it. That's the only promise about timing we make, and it's the one we can keep.

How you hand over a file on the day

A PDF is not much of a thing to put under a tree, so most people turn it into one. Any of these work:

• Print it at home and staple or bind the pages. It's a picture book made for one child, and at that age nobody is inspecting the binding.
• Send it to a print shop. The file is print-ready, so an online or local printer can produce a bound copy on their own schedule and their own cutoffs.
• Read it off a tablet on the morning and print it later. It's your file, and you can print it as many times as you want.

Hanukkah and everything else in December

None of the above depends on which holiday you're buying for. The book itself doesn't mention Christmas unless you ask us to put it in the story, so it works the same for Hanukkah, a winter birthday, or a visit that only happens once a year.

When there's more than one kid

Each book is written for one child, so two children means two books. That's a real cost, and it's also the point: the reason the older one likes it is that it isn't shared.

If you're ordering for siblings, mention it in the details of both orders. We can carry the same house, the same dog and the same trip through each of them, while every book keeps its own hero.

If it's already too late this year

Then it's too late, and we'd rather say that than sell you something that arrives on the 28th. Two things that still work:

• Wrap a printed note saying a book is being made about them, and give the finished thing when it lands. Kids handle a countdown better than adults expect.
• Move the target. A book that shows up in the flat part of January gets more attention than one competing with everything else under the tree.

How ordering works

Three steps, and only the first one happens on this site.

• You pay $9.99 and tell us the child's name, age and whatever you want in the story on the payment page.
• You email two or three photos of them to info@kater.jp from the address you paid with. There's no upload form here.
• The finished book comes back to that address as a print-ready PDF within 7 business days. If we miss that, you get a full refund without asking.

One thing worth knowing before you count backwards from a date: we're in Japan, so business days here are Japanese weekdays. Weekends and Japanese public holidays don't count, and they don't fall on the same days as yours. How the 7 days are counted is written out on the refund page. If your date is tight, email us before you pay and we'll tell you whether it fits.

Related pages

Worth reading first

• Last-minute gifts for kids, sorted by days remaining — What still works at two weeks, at one week, and on the night before
• What changes between 3 and 8, and what to give at each step — Age by age from 3 to 8: what shifts, and where a picture book fits

Other occasions

• Birthday — What to tell us so the story sounds like this year's version of them
• New sibling — When to give it, what belongs in the story, and what a book can't fix
• From grandparents — The three questions to ask the parents, and how to read it together from far away
• All guides — what to look for before you buy any personalized book