Two separate stories mesh – in the first, a young music teacher, Maggie Andrews, begins dying of a heart condition and her son Nathan tries to get a pair of Christmas shoes for her before she dies. In the second, lawyer Robert Layton and his wife Kate are slowly drifting apart and the matter comes to a head during Christmas when Kate takes over for Maggie for the school choir.

Christmas comes to Heartland, along with an anonymous call about starving horses stranded by an avalanche in the Rocky Mountains, which send Amy and Ty to their rescue.

A decade after a disastrous meteor impact wipes out most of society, a group of survivalists emerge to find themselves on a twisted version of the old Earth, with a nascent society besieged by vicious marauders, ferocious mutants, and the dreadful symptoms of a post-apocalyptic environment.

Life is hard on the Flemings’ ranch in the Alberta foothills where abused or neglected horses find refuge with a kind, hard-working family. Debts abound and the bank is about to foreclose. Can they keep the ranch running?