Chapter One– The Beginning of the End of the Beginning

As the fateful journey began on Christmas Eve, 2051, Joey Carpenter was blissfully unaware of a number of things that, in retrospect, it might have been nice to know. For example, he knew nothing about a chain of events so significant that all of the“spiritual” powers of heaven and earth had been mobilized to combat it. He had no clue that the state of religion and spirituality in the United States and the world was in danger of being altered forever, or that a seemingly insignificant decision he would soon make would actually create the potential for massive destruction. He had no idea that he was being followed and watched at every moment, because some wanted to ensure the survival of the human race. In fact, Joey really only knew two things at that point in time; that he hated Christmas and that he had to pee. If only he’d known that his need to pee would cause so many problems, he might have held it longer.

Joey hadn’t always hated Christmas. The holidays of his youth actually had been quite enjoyable, the kind they wrote about in those old stories from the 20th Century, in which smiling, fresh-faced families sat around Christmas trees, drank eggnog and sang sappy“carols” about Santa Claus, shopping, sleighs, bells and sometimes, even Jesus.

Those happy, carefree days were distant memories now, however. His childhood effectively ended the summer he turned 16, when both of his parents were killed in a traffic accident. Soon after, his then-26-year-old brother, John, married his college sweetheart (her name was either Midge or Madge; he couldn’t remember), moved to Europe and never looked back.  By the time Joey met his future wife Mary, a few weeks after his 20th birthday, he virtually had no family of his own, so he was left with little choice but to spend each of the next 22 Christmases with Mary’s family, the Brauns; five as either her boyfriend or fiancé, and seventeen as her husband.

Every one of those 22 Christmases had been exactly the same. It wasn’t that the Brauns had developed a number of wonderful family traditions they adhered to; they didn’t. They ate too much and gave each other presents, just like every other family. But the entire Christmas ordeal was like an intense case of déjà vu; the same events happened in the same order every single year, and Joey knew exactly what would happen this year before h