Christmas assignment: Ben was sitting in his living room reading a book by the fireplace on Christmas Eve. He had lost contact with his family and girlfriend long ago, when he was deployed in Afghanistan by the army, so he didn’t have anyone to share the holidays with, which he was very sad about. His family wrote a final letter to him, that they didn’t want to be worried about whether or not Ben was gonna come back alive, so they stopped writing to him, and didn’t even meet him in the airport when he got back home. He thought they were just overreacting and that they didn’t mean what they wrote in the letter, but they meant it quite seriously. He knew he hadn’t been the best son, and got into a lot of fights with his mom and dad, but he became very sad that they could do something like that to him, made Ben very sad, and by the time he got home, he was too afraid to call his family or drop by their house to say that he was okay. So he sat there in his chair reading a book, all by himself and he thought about his family and his girlfriend. Thinking about all that made Ben very sad and tears began to roll down his cheeks. He sat there for a good half an hour crying, when suddenly he heard a loud thump outside the house. He wiped the tears of his face with the back of his hand, and layed the book on his chair and stood up to check what caused the sound. He stood in front of the window looking out, but it was too dark to see anything, so he went over to the front door and looked outside, and what he saw made him forget everything about his girlfriend and family. Ben got on his shoes and coat in a hurry, there was a reindeer on his front lawn! He walked up to the reindeer, which surprisingly enough, didn’t run off, it seemed quite used to humans, it even let Ben pet it on its side. But something about the reindeer was very strange; it had a harness on that was