Plot
Feeling outdated, Santa Claus allows Death to trade masks with him, Santa representing understanding, Death representing knowledge, or Science. Santa Claus, now a Scientist, makes people believe in the fictional wheelmine and the power of Science. Later, Death, masked as Santa, runs into the real Santa, who is yelling about an accident that occurred at the wheelmine. Death explains that wheelmines, nor people, really exist and then goes on to say that the only way Santa can avoid the angry citizens is to prove that he does not exist.
The people enter, disillusioned by Science, and blame Santa for the accident. A child in the crowd claims that what the mob calls Science is actually Santa Claus, and because the mob does not believe in Santa Claus, he does not exist. To thank Death for his advice, Santa gives up his body. The child returns and notices the change in Santa and they both admit that they are searching for someone they lost.
In the final scene, the woman enters, weeping about how the world has lost all the love due to knowledge. She sees Santa as Death and thinks he is the real Death and she admits that she looks forward to dying. The mob enters to announce the death of Science and the child, Santa, and the woman reunite. Santa takes off the Death mask and they realize the power of love between them.
Read more about this topic: Santa Claus: A Morality
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)