The Twelve Days of Christmas Eve

Cutthroat business executive Calvin Carter is a workaholic. After taking over the reins of the family business, The Buck $top$ Here, from his father, Calvin is able to turn it around from being in the red to becoming the number-two chain of discount stores in the country within a year. In wanting to be the first American company to expand into the Latin American market, he spends Christmas Eve meeting with Isobel Frias, who is evaluating proposals of willing American players to possibly partner with that Latin American venture. On Calvin's urging, Ms. Frias has rerouted her flights for this meeting before returning home to Brazil this evening despite she missing Christmas with her family in taking this meeting. Calvin expects his head office staff to do whatever it takes to impress Ms. Frias, at the expense of what they may have planned with their family this day. Calvin himself could miss a luncheon with his current live-in girlfriend Rhianna, who made the reservation at an exclusive restaurant months in advance. He might also miss the Christmas choir concert of his adolescent son Eric Carter, whom he rarely sees; he lives with his mother, Calvin's ex-wife Marilyn Carter. And Calvin has no intention of visiting the flagship store partly managed by his younger brother Jesse Carter, where their father Hank Carter, despite his aged years and failing memory, still enthusiastically and whole-heartedly plays Santa on Christmas Eve. Having missed all his family commitments, including the traditional extended Carter family Christmas Eve evening party at Jesse's, Calvin still believes he had almost the perfect day, the only snag being that Ms. Frias did not sign on the dotted line, although all indications are that she will. Suffering what he believes is a severe bump on the head at the evening's end, Calvin awakens the next morning with deja vu and eventually realizes that he is experiencing the same Christmas Eve over again--and relishes the chance not to make it almost perfect, but to make it perfectly perfect by taking advantage of what went wrong in his mind the first time around to get Ms. Frias definitely choosing his company for the venture. However, Calvin eventually discovers from Angie, the "nurse" who cares for him at the end of each of these Christmas Eves, that he will have 12 Christmas Eves to get the day right, and he'll know it wasn't right by the fact of suffering a violent death at its end, each successive night being more violent than the previous night. If he does not figure it out, he will just not wake up on Day 13. Calvin's problem may be the divide between what he considers getting the day right into actually what it means to get the day right in the true spirit of Christmas.