Christmas has always required extra hands to make it happen, and this film goes looking for the people who supplied them in centuries past. It traces the holiday's labor history back before Christmas became a commercial season, into jobs that were less about festivity than survival: chimney sweeping, coal mining, factory work, and street vending among them. Interviews and historical footage carry the account of what these jobs actually demanded, physically and otherwise, from the people who had no choice but to do them. Rather than staying at the level of dates and industries, the film follows individual accounts of what these jobs cost the people who worked them and the families around them. The picture that emerges is of a holiday built partly on labor nobody celebrated at the time, work that kept the season running for everyone else while offering little of its comfort to those doing it.