Million Billion Santa Clauses is a Japanese-Finnish collaboration that enchants readers regardless of age by its crayon illustrations by Marika Maijala and the insightful, slightly different Christmas story written by Hiroko Motain. Million Billion Santa Clauses published by Schildts & Söderströms was one of the candidates of The Most Beautiful Book of the year competition in 2014. The book was also shortlisted at the Grafia’s Vuoden Huiput competition in the illustrations category. After its first publication in 2014, the book has been translated into more than 10 languages. 

A long time ago, there was only one Santa Claus in the world. And there were very few people and very few children in the world as well. Santa Claus could easily hand out all the world’s presents in a single night. As the years went by, the number of people grew. The number of children grew, too. The sack of presents became too heavy. So Santa Claus asked if there might be two of him. Two Santa Clauses were twice as fast as one, but only half the size. As more years went by, more and more people and children came along and the number of Santa Clauses grew and grew–and at the same time, all the Santas grew smaller and smaller. Finally, there were a million billion Santa Clauses in the world, invisible to the eye and obviously too small to carry presents. What happened then?