Hello and welcome to Make-Up. I'm your host, Amanda. Today's story is a request from Callie.

Callie is six years old, and she lives in Saranak Lake, New York in the United States.

Callie has asked for a story about a penguin, a Christmas tree, and Santa.

Thanks, Callie, for this fun idea. We hope you enjoy your story.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a big girl named Callie who loved penguins.

In fact, Callie loved penguins so much that she knew almost everything there was to know about them.

She loved to watch documentaries about penguins on the Nature Channel,

and every chance she had she would go to the public library and take out books about, you guessed it, penguins.

Her goal was to one day be a penguinologist,

which is a kind of field biologist that studies penguins.

So one year, when she heard about a penguin drawing contest that had a penguin watching trip to Antarctica as its grand prize,

she knew she had to try. On her next trip to the library, in addition to her usual fare of

penguin books, Callie took out some books about wildlife drawing so that she could prepare herself

for the contest.

After weeks of study and practice, the deadline was approaching, and Callie finally felt ready.

Since Christmas was coming, she decided to depart a little bit from strict scientific accuracy

and drew an emperor penguin, the biggest species of penguin,

standing next to a Christmas tree surrounded by presents that were all wrapped in beautiful

black and white wrapping paper with yellow ribbons complementing the color of the emperor

penguin.

Well, as luck would have it, that detail for the Christmas tree and the beautiful wrapping paper really made Callie's drawing stand out to the judging panel, and they chose her drawing as the

winner from among hundreds and hundreds of entries, and Callie won the Penguin

...