For Christmas fan Eoin Colfer, the prospect of writing a modern-day tale celebrating the beloved winter holiday was both heady and daunting. Sure, the author of the multimillion-selling Artemis Fowlseries knows a thing or two about telling a good story. But when you look, for example, at A Christmas Carol—an all-time favorite he considers nearly perfect—the stakes seem as high as reindeer can fly.

“If you’re going to do a Christmas book, you want to have a good idea first, and that takes a long time,” says Colfer, speaking with Kirkus via Zoom from his Dublin home. “Then, you have to not be writing an eight-book series. Now that my series days are kind of over, I’m allowing myself to use all the best ideas that I’ve accumulated over the years, like vodka-drinking dragons and grumpy Santa Clauses.”

In Juniper’s Christmas (Roaring Brook Press, Oct. 31), an admittedly grumpy Santa Claus hasn’t delivered gifts to the world’s children since the death of his true love nearly 10 years prior. He’s gone AWOL from the North Pole, flying under the radar at North London’s Cedar Park, where he stealthily performs good deeds for the park’s unhoused population.

Plucky, magnanimous Juniper Lane is the 11-year-old daughter of the park’s caretaker. When her mother, Jennifer, goes missing just a few days before Christmas, she seeks out this mysterious Mr. Fixit—known only as “Niko”—to see if he can help bring her mother home. What neither knows is that Juniper might be the only child on earth with the potential to help Niko regain his Christmas spirit, in an action-packed adventure Kirkus calls a“soaring flight fueled by joys, sorrows, and deeds both ill and good” (starred review).

(As the following transcript represents a 40-minute chat between an author of Irish extraction and an interviewer of Irish descent, it has naturally been lightly edited and heavily condensed.)

What inspired this beautiful Christmas book?

I was working on a Christmas musical called Noël. Now, I didn’t write the music, but I did write the book and the lyrics, and there’s a few characters in it that I wasn’t finished with. I’d also been doing a book called Illegal (with Andrew Donkin), which was about the migration of kids from North Africa to Europe. That turned out to be one of the problems I thought was in one place—Europe—that, as we toured that book, turned out to be in every place. And I was doing some work with a charity called Focus Ireland, and they gave me the statistic that one in four migrants ends up homeless. That statistic really stuck with me. So I tried to put those two elements together—Christmas and people who are experiencing homelessness—so Juniper’s Christmas came out of that. It is in many ways a very, very traditional Christmas story that has lovely, warm characters, but in another way it’s a modern story.

We know Santa, generally, as “Jolly Old St. Nick”—emphasis jolly, emphasis old. But not in your telling.

Whenever I write a book, I always think, What’s the expectation of it? If I’m writing about a known character, what’s the expectation of them? I’ve done a few sequels to other people’s books, like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Doctor Who. I always begin by looking at a character and saying, What do people know about this character, and What can I bring to it? With Santa, I tried to make him a little bit younger, a little more curmudgeonly. He’s actually closer to a young Scrooge, in the beginning. He has a journey then, because we want to bring him back to the lovable character we had in the beginning.

You made me realize I’d made a lot of assumptions about Santa.

People don’t think of Santa being grief-stricken. Christmas might be stolen by Jack Frost or something like that, but Santa is always Santa. But in this story, I think the greatest enemy to the [holiday as we know it] is Santa’s current frame of mind. He has to meet someone amazing to bring him back to himself. There’s a long history of that in children’s literature, of people who remind adults how they used to feel when they were younger—Anne of Green Gables, Pippi Longstocking—and that’s what Juniper is. She’s one of these startling kids who just brings out the best in everybody.

What else do you love about Juniper?

I think what I love about her is she’s determined to see the bright side. She had a bumpy few years [following her father’s death], but she came out of it. And now that her mother is coming out of it, she just thinks, This is great; everything’s going to be fantastic. Dad is not forgotten, but he would want us to be happy. Even when her mother goes missing, she has the determination to find her, to succeed, to show up.

You’ve mentioned your series days are more or less over, and I respect that. However, in an epilogue to Juniper’s Christmas, I did see a little prompt that someone might make use of if they did want to continue the story in another book…

Yeah, I do have an idea. It’s my Achilles’ heel! I have to leave that little line. Thanks, Daniel Defoe! Is it Daniel Defoe—the actor is Willem Dafoe, so it’s not him—it’s the guy who wrote Robinson Crusoe. [Ed: Yes, it’s Daniel Defoe.] Maybe I’d better write these books quickly before the rest of my brain disintegrates.

My copy of Juniper’s Christmas came with a postcard affixed to the last page. It says that for the first 10,000 people who return these postcards to Santa’s Helpers (c/o Macmillan) by Christmas Eve, the publisher will donate one book to a charity supporting unhoused families.

This is very important, and the most beautiful thing is that it wasn’t my idea. I did not push it on anybody. I didn’t demand it while stroking my beard, as writers do in their author photos. None of that happened. It was everybody at Roaring Brook Press who said, “Wouldn’t this be a nice idea?” And absolutely, it’s an amazing idea! I’ve been working with various charities over here [in Ireland and the U.K.], so it’s lovely to see that that’s going to be carried through all over the States. And wouldn’t that be a lovely Christmas present for somebody who is somewhere that’s not their home, somewhere that they’re kind of in [a holding pattern] until their lives can begin again, to get this book and maybe feel in a small way that someone like them is out there and that this is representing them? Juniper’s dad had to go through the [British immigration] system; in Ireland, sometimes going through that system can take 10 years. We really need to catch up with our own humanity in a way, because there’s people being left behind, and it’s unnecessary. There are so many amazing charities in the U.S. that serve people dealing with homelessness or migrants arriving. I think it would be beautiful for people to receive a copy of this book out of the blue. It’d be lovely to see that.

Editor at large Megan Labrise is the host of the Fully Booked podcast.