Four mental patients - who, due to unauthorized experiments, believe they're living in a dream and have shed all moral imperatives - escape and find their way to the nearest bus-load of stranded schoolgirls.

An isolated, overweight girl with a penchant for shoplifting, gets pushed from pillar to post as the authorities struggle to know what to do with her.

As a little girl is daydreaming out the window, her wicked father comes home. It's Christmas Eve. She tells her father that she was thinking about her Grandmother and of how nice Christmas was when she was alive. The father, angry and bitter, tells the girl that she must be out early to sell the matches or she can think about a beating. He tells her she needs to keep her mind on selling the matches and that she cannot come home until every one of them is sold. Then he laments about how, since her momma died, she is more than pain and trouble and is always in the way.