"The Little Match Girl" opens on a cold, gloomy New Year's Eve. The title character, a poor little girl, is walking in the snow without shoes or a hat. When she left her home earlier she had been wearing her mother's slippers, which fell off the girl's feet when she ran out of the path of two carriages while crossing a road. One slipper was lost in the snow while the other was stolen by a boy who said he'd use it one day to cradle one of his children. Her feet are red and blue with cold.
The little girl wanders the streets gripped by cold and hunger, but she knows if she returns home not having sold a single matchbox her father will beat her. She sees warmly lit homes behind windows and smells roasting goose.
The girl lies against a corner where the walls of two houses meet. While shivering, she remembers her matches. She strikes one and watches the flame dance like a candle. She feels its heat and visualizes a massive wood-burning stove. She extends her feet to the stove only for it to vanish when the match goes out.
She lights another match, which turns the wall she leans against transparent. She sees inside to a fancy table set with a steaming cooked goose. The goose jumps off the table and waddles toward her with a knife and fork in its breast. The flame extinguishes itself before the goose reaches her.
She ignites a third match, which sparks an image of a gloriously decorated Christmas tree. It is illuminated by a thousand candles. The tree is decorated with beautiful little pictures, and, as she sticks out her hand as if to grab one, the match goes out. But as it does, the tree's decorative candles now seem to be stars in the sky. One shoots across the sky, falling in the arc of a magnificent trail of fire.
The little girl says to herself that someone must be dying. She learned from her dead grandmother that when stars fall from the sky, a human ascends to heaven. Desperately missing her grandmother's love, the little girl strikes another match to conjure an image of the grandmother. She begs the grandmother to take her with her.
Knowing her grandmother will disappear like the other visions, the girl rubs a bundle of matches against the wall until they all ignite simultaneously to produce a brilliant glow. The grandmother appears, clear and beautiful. She embraces the girl and, within a cocoon of joy and warmth, they both rise higher and higher away from the Earth. They are with God.
The perspective shifts to reveal that little girl froze overnight. She sits with red cheeks and a smiling mouth, the New Year's sun rising on her stiff body.
People speculate that she must have struck matches to keep warm. They can't imagine the beauty and joy she witnessed in her last moments of life.
