The inspiration for this book came to me in the middle of the night after waking up from a dream with the words The Thing I Say I Saw Last Night in my head. It was such an evocative title that I wrote it down and started to work out the story. It naturally progressed into a Christmas story as it was my favorite holiday growing up – although I always found the waiting unbearable. I was the one who would wake up at three in the morning and rally my sisters to go down to the tree. We'd open our gifts and then re-wrap then so that our parents wouldn’t know. Of course, they always did – especially when we would proceed to guess what the wrapped gifts were with 100% accuracy. It became the family joke that no present in the house was safe from me! In retrospect, I think the little boy in the story has a lot of me in him. I was just never able to stay awake long enough to catch ‘you know who’ in the act!