The part of the basket that is still around next week

A basket, sorted by what survives the week

Take a normal basket apart and each part has a predictable lifespan. Knowing which is which is most of the decision.

Sweets and chocolate

Gone by Monday, and the jelly beans nobody likes are gone by Thursday. This is the part that is supposed to be consumed, and a basket without it is a strange basket. Nothing here is an argument against candy.

The small plastic things inside the eggs

Played with hard for about forty minutes. By the end of the week they are under the sofa, in the car, and in the vacuum cleaner. Cheap, effective on the morning, and finished.

Another stuffed animal

Joins a pile that already exists. Occasionally one of them becomes the one, but you cannot pick which, and the odds get worse with every basket.

The thing that is still there next week

A puzzle they grow into, something for outdoors that gets used all summer, or a book with their name in it. Not always a book — but it is the only row where what you spent still exists at the end of April.

A book written for one child sits in the last row for an obvious reason: there is only one of them, it has their name in it, and it does not get confused with anything else in the house. It costs $9.99, so it goes in alongside the rest of the basket rather than replacing it.

The part people get wrong

What we deliver is a print-ready file by email. A basket needs an object in it, so for this occasion — unlike most of the year — the file is not the finish line. Somebody has to print it before Sunday morning.

• Two clocks, not one. The book takes 7 business days from the day we have your photos. Printing and binding takes however long it takes where you live, and that clock starts only when the first one has stopped.
• A tablet in a basket is not a basket present. It works fine as a thing to read on Sunday evening, but it is not the object under the paper grass, and it competes with everything else on the screen.
• Printed at home, it is paper. That is enough for a basket and not enough to last. Plenty of people put the home-printed version in the basket and have a proper copy made afterwards.

The routes from file to object, and what each one gives up, are worked through on the printing guide.

Easter moves, so count from your own date

Unlike most gift dates, this one is not fixed. It swings by about a month between years, and churches on the Julian calendar often mark it on a different Sunday again. Anything written here as a deadline would be wrong for some readers and some years, so work backwards from the date your family is actually keeping.

Two things make the count shorter than it looks. Our business days are Japanese weekdays, which do not line up with yours, and the printing has to fit between the file arriving and the basket being filled. Ordering in the first half of the month before is comfortable; the week before is not.

What goes in the story

The book is about the child, not about the holiday. Spring is simply when it arrives, and what makes it worth reading in July is that it is about them rather than about a date.

• What they are like right now: the obsession, the phrase they repeat, the thing they are proud of having learned this year.
• Anything from the season itself you want in it — the hunt in the yard, the cousins who come, the boots that are too small this year.
• Anything that should stay out. Families keep this day differently, and we write from what you send us rather than from an assumption about what it means in your house.

If there is more than one child

Baskets get matched down to the number of eggs, and a book written for one child cannot be shared between two. Two children means two books, ordered together, each about its own kid. It is the one item on the list where the older one immediately notices whether you did that.

How ordering works

Three steps, and the first two are done before you close the tab — nothing to install, nothing to post.

• You pay $9.99 and tell us the child's name, age and whatever you want in the story on the payment page.
• You upload two or three photos of them on the page you land on straight after checkout — pick the files and you're done, no email to write. Prefer email? Send them to info@kater.jp from the address you paid with instead.
• The finished book comes back to the address you paid with 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

• Turning a print-ready PDF into a book a kid can hold — Four ways to turn the file into a physical book, and what each one gives up
• Last-minute gifts for kids, sorted by days remaining — What still works at two weeks, at one week, and on the night before

Other occasions

• Birthday — What to tell us so the story sounds like this year's version of them
• Christmas — How the timing works with no carrier involved, and what to do when it's already late
• 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
• Baby shower — Who each present at a shower is actually for, and the one case we can't make anything for
• First birthday — Sorted by when each present actually gets used, and what a one-year-old does to paper
• Mother's Day — What changes depending on who it's from, and how to count back from a date that moves
• All guides — what to look for before you buy any personalized book