Christmas Past

Jessie Malone is an American doctor in her mid to late 20s working in a London Emergency Room — and still grieving over the death of her fiancé. As the story opens, she has just lost a patient on the operating table, a death she takes personally. As she leaves for the night, her father calls, begging her to come home for Christmas. Jessie refuses. She's still cocooning, attempting to heal.

Moments later, she nearly hits a pedestrian. This is Sam Prescott, a handsome man in a Royal Navy uniform. He asks for a ride, and then forces himself into her car — claiming it's a 'war matter.' Jessie later discovers he just wants a ride home. He promised his young bride he'd be home for Christmas, and it's nearly midnight on Christmas Eve.

They arrive at the house, but Sam doesn't recognize anything. Jessie goes to ask directions, and is shocked when the resident, Roger Matthews, answers and says, 'You've brought Sam, haven't you?' Someone tries to bring a Royal Navy Man on Christmas Eve every year. 'When you get back to your car, you'll find he's vanished.'

He has. Sam is gone. Only one set of footprints in the snow lead away from the car.

A year later, Jessie isn't much better. She's … haunted. By the loss of her fiancé, by the patients she loses — the ones who, like her, didn't get a miracle — and by her inexplicable encounter with Sam's ghost. She still isn't ready to go home, even for the holiday. The hospital psychologist, worried, forces Jessie to take a few days off.

When she gets home, she talks to her brother, Jason, who is working on his doctorate in cultural anthropology. He's attempting to trace an urban legend back to an original source: the first 'friend of a friend.' He twists Jessie's arm until she agrees to go to a pub to hear the story. She is stunned to learn that the story matches her encounter with Sam, almost word for word. It's her own madness made manifest.

Jessie helps Jason, without telling him why, and learns that someone has encountered Sam every year since World War II, starting in Germany, France, and finally England. But he never makes it home. The details always match, but the pattern is different from the way urban legends usually spread. There's a mystery.

She does learn one more detail: Sam seems to appear to people who have suffered a profound loss, who have experienced death.

Jessie keeps digging for a rational explanation.

Finally, she meets another source, and decides that she's not mad and she's not alone. Denial offers no safe harbor. While the others have found a strange sort of comfort after their encounter with Sam, just knowing that death isn't the end and the soul endures, she hasn't. Maybe she still has more to do.

If she can't have a miracle to save her own love, maybe she can be the miracle for someone else's. Sam's story is her's now. The question is, how is she going to tell it?

She investigates, and learns that there was a real Sam. More, his wife never stopped waiting for him. Jessie knows what she has to do. Somehow, she has to find Sam again.

Christmas Eve arrives. She finds Sam again, and offers him a ride. But she knows … Sam's wife is dying in a hospital in America, and Sam vanishes at midnight. How can she get him there? Thankfully, the time zones — and a miracle or two — work in her favor.

She arrives in time to see Emily fading … but then Sam and Emily, dancing, forever young, enduring. She says goodbye, and is finally able to say goodbye to her fiancé, too. And then she goes home, home for Christmas, and we learn that she's been telling the story to her family.