Christmas Comes Twice

Cheryl Jenkins is the Deputy Director at the Federal Science Association in Washington DC. She only accepted the job evaluating grant proposals five years ago while she waited for a job in her chosen field of Astronomy, and now she's been at the Association five years longer than she wanted instead of doing real scientific research. On her week-long working trip home to Wellsboro for the Christmas holidays, Cheryl muses about the "what-ifs" of that fateful week five years ago that led her on this path to work at the Association. At the annual Wellsboro Christmas Carnival, Cheryl steps onto the solitary carousel by herself, only to step off it five years in the past at the start of that fateful week. She begins to believe she can make different decisions and have some impact, knowing now what she didn't know then to change the past, such as fixing the disastrous sole date with her high-school crush, current Mayor Terrence Fletcher; influencing the career path of her younger sister Trish, whose dream of opening her own restaurant Cheryl has always seen as a mistake; and, most importantly avoiding the meeting with her current boss, Dr. Phillips, so that she would never have known about that job at the Association. She also wants to bask in things she knows she can't change about the present, like spending more time with her mentor, her high-school science teacher Miss Nelson, who passed away unexpectedly shortly thereafter. This entails also spending time with her high-school adversary George Campbell, who worked alongside Miss Nelson. As Cheryl tries to change her past for a different present, she might find a different understanding about many issues upon closer examination.