Charlie, an elevator operator for an apartment building on the upscale side of Manhattan, wakes up to the darkness of 6:00 A.M. on Christmas Day to head to work, silently complaining to himself that he is practically the only person in the city to be doing so. He is barely on the clock before the fur-coated Mrs. Hewing—a woman of low morals, as far as Charlie is concerned—is only just now returning home wearing a dress beneath the fur indicating she has been out all night. On the ride up to her apartment, she wishes him “Merry Christmas” Charlie replies that it is not so merry for him. In fact, he considers Christmas to be a sad season for many people like him.
A short time later, a drunken couple named Walser enters the elevator to rise to their penthouse apartment. The state of the Walsers prompts Charlie to reflect on the economic inequity of his life and others. After a few tenants heading out to an early Christmas mass, things are quiet in the elevator until after 9:00 A.M. A nursemaid and child tanned in late December from a holiday to Bermuda get Charlie to thinking about all the miles he’s put on operating elevators in the ten years he’s worked in the job in various buildings. This thought still consumes him when the DePaul's on the ninth-floor ring the elevator, wishing him a merry Christmas as they enter the cage he calls his prison. He responds much as he had with Mrs. Hewing, except he enlarges upon it by stating that he has no plans for Christmas dinner other than a sandwich. Mrs. DePaul responds with a hearty promise to make him up a Christmas dinner tray after they have officially carved the goose.
Thus begins a series of events in which various tenants wish Charlie a merry Christmas and received increasingly complex stories about his state. What begins as merely a somewhat sad tale of living alone in a single furnished room eventually expands to an entire family including six children, two of him lie moldering in the grave. Charlie’s addition of children to his mythical family is partly inspired by his genuine empathy for children he has seen on the sidewalks and imagined to be having a miserable Christmas, at least in comparison to the children in the apartment building. By the afternoon, Charlie has managed to collect a Christmas dinner worthy of a sultan, hiding his booty in the employee locker room.
In fact, it is not just lobster, mouse, turkey, plum pudding, and various assorted other delicacies which the guilt-ridden tenants have showered upon the poor elevator operator, but gifts as well. Charlie’s Christmas haul ranges from socks and handkerchiefs to after-shave lotion, steak knives, cuff links, and dress shirts. Suddenly, instead of a prisoner stuck in a cage, Charlie views his job in the elevator as a position of respect and even some authority. He has grown heady with the love of life supplied by the love of things.
And then Mrs. Gadshill rings for the elevator from the 12th floor. Charlie has been zooming up and down alone in the elevator while the rest of the building feasts upon Christmas dinners. Lost in his thrill of being showered with attention, of being noticed for the first time in his life, Charlie makes his fatal mistake. He continues his wild ride in the elevator with Mrs. Gadshill in terrified tow. When he finally brings the cage to a stop, she runs out in horror straight to the superintendent’s office and Charlies is summarily fired.
With sobering up comes a sense of sober awareness of his true mistake. Not the wild ride up and down with Mrs. Gadshill, but the abuse of the goodhearted intentions of the tenants he served. The bad thing Charlie has done was not the lying to the rich or the acceptance of the gifts, but rather that he turned out to be every bit as unworthy of this inequity as they. He was given the chance to intervene in the misery of others and instead chose to think only of himself.
Charlie gathers up all the presents given to him and heads to his landlady and her children, convinced deep in his heart that they have been spending this Christmas Day every bit as miserable as he. He showered the children with wrapped boxes which they gleefully attack. Before they have made even a dent, however, he is off to share his good fortune with the poor Deckers on Hudson Street who, he is sure, “ain’t got nothing.” As he makes his exit from his landlady’s apartment, she quickly moves to stop the kids from opening those packages still remaining wrapped. What Charlie had no way of nothing was that her kids had already been the recipient of good-hearted, well-intentioned charitable efforts by others to make sure her kids enjoyed a happy Christmas. Her face alights with a beatific glow as she realizes that—like with Charlie’s plans for the Deckkers—she, too, can make a happier Christmas for the Shannon family. She urges her kids to gather up the unwrapped packages as he heads out with a heart full of “licentious benevolence” before the day is over. She is tired from her own Christmas labor, but only a few more hours still reside in the day and she is well aware that we are all bound to display this charitable spirit of Christmas for just twenty-four hours out of the year.
