A Christmas Story

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A few years ago I was living in my home town, Bethlehem PA, when I passed through a difficult time with my fiance. Despite thinking we were on the same page as far as our future was concerned, I slowly began to realise that in fact, we were worlds apart in terms of our hopes, ambitions and dreams. Jeff was a homeboy who wanted no more than to continue with his steady job at the local mall and find a nice home girl who just wanted to stay at home and have babies and cook and clean, all to satiate his selfish male desire to be in control of my entire life.

As for me, I wanted to leave what I felt was a suffocating town that had limited career opportunities for an ambitious woman like me. I think the Glass Ceiling concept was conceived in Bethlehem PA by the forefathers who developed a mission to populate the town with Stepford wives. At times, it seemed to me that all Jeff wanted was an attractive, compliant, docile wife who would allow herself to be subjugated, neglecting her own life and career desires to fulfil his. It felt like the future life that was being planned for me was one that consisted of devoting all of my time to on-demand sex, shopping, cooking and cleaning. The very idea appalled me.

Eventually, fearful of losing my deeply felt sense of who and what I really was, and my own real purpose in life, to study, get a career, make a ton of money and live the high life, I managed to slip out of town under cover of darkness and headed to the big city of my dreams, the Big Apple that is New York City.

In New York, I managed to find a variety of jobs to support myself and pay my fees for a university degree in Marketing and Public Relations. After that, I got myself a decent job with a good salary and great prospects, with a clear pathway right up to the board of directors.

Of course, I felt that to a certain degree, my way forward depended upon the patronage of one of the company's senior managers who was constantly on my case. Zak was always trying to convince me that my future success would be more assured if only I would go to bed with him.

Zak was a very handsome guy with a very easygoing, charming character, which made the idea tempting. However, I felt uncomfortable with the idea of basically prostituting myself to get on. So far I had managed to hold Zak off, but with Christmas coming up, that time of year when everybody else is with family, I didn't much fancy the prospect of tucking into Christmas Day turkey with only David Letterman repeats on the TV for company. Even worse, it was that time of year when a blanket of snow covered the entire state, which severely limited any chance of getting out to socialise with other single like-minded people.

And anyway, from previous years' experiences, it seemed to me that the whole meaning of Christmas had long been forgotten in New York. All everybody thought about was going on a big spend, going into debt for things that they neither wanted, needed, or could afford. For some, it would take the entire rest of the year working their fingers to the bone to pay off the debt, just before going out to do it all over again the following Christmas.

As the festive season all too rapidly approached, the idea of finally giving in to Zak's carnal desires became increasingly tempting. Eventually, I decided to head out of the city and go back home to spend some quality Christmas time with my own family, my parents and my younger sister, whom I had not seen for over five years.

Back in Bethlehem, I almost immediately sensed a change among the town folk. The women came across as deliriously happy with their lives, and the men seemed to be more than happy to take what seemed to me to be a subservient role to the women.

One day I went into town to do some Christmas shopping and bumped into an old school friend of mine, Maxine. She invited me to have a coffee and catch up a little on our progress through life since we had last seen each other.

Over a Starbucks latte, Maxine told me that things had changed in Bethlehem ever since the arrival of some woman called Tricia who was a science and engineering Harvard graduate.

Apparently, Tricia's specialism was data programming and processing in the field of animatronics. I must be honest, the sciences were never my forte, it was like some sort of black art for new world witches. Anyway, what that had to do with the changes I had observed was beyond me. Besides, Maxine had always been something of a conspiracy theorist, she always saw things nobody else could. I sometimes wondered if she was a heretic occult witch from the dark side of her religion.

After chatting with Max for far too long, I headed for home. On the way, I called in at a gas station and could hardly believe my eyes when I suddenly saw Jeff, sitting in a very beat-up old car.

Jeff got out of the car to say hello and seemed genuinely pleased to see me, especially since I had run out on him and left him dangling in a cloud of uncertainty.

I noticed that Jeff had three spaniels in his car and he very proudly told me that he had given them all the same name, King. Jeff said that way when he let them off the leash in the local park he only had to call one name and they would all come running.

After no more than five minutes I told Jeff I had to go, my family were waiting for me, and I still had to stop off en route at our local mall to buy some rather expensive exotica presents at a store that specialised in that kind of stuff. One of the things my handsome salary allowed me to do was indulge in buying very expensive presents.

Jeff told me that he too was in a bit of a hurry as he was on his way to bail out an old friend of his, called Joe, who had lost his job and was about to be evicted, along with his wife Mary and their new baby, Jesus. Jeff showed me an envelope containing a few bank notes, which he later told me was the last of his wages for the month, money he had been planning to spend on some of his own bills.

I turned my head to look again at Jeff's old beater of a car, a little better than an old wreck and wondered how on earth he could afford to help others when it was perfectly clear that he was not that well off himself.

Touched by Jeff's desire to help, I suddenly found myself digging into my handbag to fish out my own stash of money which I was going to spend on presents my family really didn't need. I handed the money to Jeff and told him to add it to his money.

As I passed the money over, I realised that I was seeing Jeff in a totally new light. Here was a man I ran away from due to his selfish lack of thought for others, me in particular, giving his own much-needed cash to somebody else in dire need.

Over the rest of the holiday, I met up with Jeff a few times and he really was a changed man, a totally different person to the one I had run away from five years past. He could not do enough for me. At one meeting with Jeff, we talked about the future and the possibility of getting back together. I told him I would give it a great deal of thought and get back to him.

Before I left, I met up with my friend Maxine one more time. She said she had something to show me. She pulled a big document file out of a bag and told me to take a look. It was a Harvard thesis by a woman called Patricia Overman. On the page after the title and contents pages, was a synopsis about how it would be eminently possible for her to demonstrate how it was possible to create an exact, authentic, organically functioning copy of a human being and program it to be precisely what one wanted it to be. The only obstacle to overcome was the question of what to do with the original person.

"Well, that means…." I muttered out loud to Maxine. I kept the rest of my sentence to myself. It meant Jeff was…

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