A Christmas Tale, The Lost History of Michael McDonald

Imagine knowing that you were adopted and you had no idea why or how you came to be in the orphanage? One day, at around five years old, your parents just gave you up. Your memories don’t provide any insight. Nightmares of some monster chasing you is the only clue. You feel a stain upon your heart at being tossed aside like trash. Michael McDonald is such a person who has struggled for years to learn of his missing history only to continually hit roadblocks in his search. He feels there is more than what his memories can offer as a broken incomplete man after all these years at fifty four years old.
Seven days before Christmas he receives an unusual gift from a man in a turban with a strong foreign accent. This gift is a box filled with sand. It is a magic trick. The sand can never touch the floor. Miraculously, every time when the sand it tossed out of the case, it returns. That night in the quiet darkness of his parlor the sand comes to life. A man assembles itself out of the box to sit on a rocking chair and dispense Michael’s Christmas truth. Over the next seven days Michael’s life is turned on its head while the missing part of his history is slowly restored. He learns that he is the lynch pin to many people’s Christmas truths but never more so than for his best friend Denise McConnally.
Denise has been by his side his whole life. Aside from Michael’s strange behavior this holiday she is drawn to him, more so than ever before. She now sees him as the love interest she should have married thirty years ago instead of her loser ex husband. Her intense feelings make her do wildly interesting things to get him to see that they should be the couple she hoped for since they were in high school together. During this time, her encounter with the magic trick has her remembering a time when she was a child visiting her Grandfather’s home. She remembered that a box of sand showed up at his door one day before a party. That was seven days before he died saving over two hundred women from a mill fire and the day when his last will & testament went missing. He was a rich man and without the will the family became penniless overnight.
The Sandman instructs her to seek out the will. In Denise’s travels, while Michael discovers his past, she is discovered by the Jailer, a woman with a gun and an agenda. Her goal is to steal the will and take what she feels is owed to her. Danger looms over Denise and Michael during their time of discovery, history, and feelings of love. After so many years all their dreams could finally come true, only to be stolen by a crazy woman with a gun.