“Vanka Zhukov, a nine-year-old boy who was sent to the shoemaker Alakhin’s studies three months ago, did not go to bed on Christmas night.” He wrote a letter to his grandfather Konstantin Makarych. Vanka is an orphan. He thinks about his grandfather, a 65-year-old “skinny and brisk old man with a cheerful face and always drunk eyes,” who serves as a watchman for the gentlemen Zhikharev. In the afternoon, grandfather sleeps or jokes with cooks, and at night he knocks on his clapper. Grandfather has two dogs - Kashtanka and Loach.

Vanka writes in an ingenuous childish language about how difficult it is for him at a shoemaker, and asks his grandfather to pick it up. “And in the week the mistress told me to clean the herring, and I started from the tail, and she took the herring and with her face began to poke me in the mug. Dear grandfather, take me away from here, otherwise I will die. I’ll rub you tobacco, and if anything, then chop me up like Sidorov’s goat. ” Vanka would like to run to the village on foot, "yes there are no boots, I'm afraid of frost." He writes about Moscow: “And Moscow is a big city. All the houses of the master and horses are many, but there are no sheep and the dogs are not evil. ”

While writing a letter, Vanka is constantly distracted; various pictures of life in the village pop up in his memory. He recalls how he and his grandfather went to the forest for Christmas for the gentlemen before Christmas. “It was a fun time! And the grandfather quacked, and the frost quacked, and looking at them, Vanka quacked. " She recalls the young lady Olga Ignatyevna, whose Vankin's mother Pelageya, when she was alive, served as a maid. Olga Ignatyevna fed Vanka with lollipops, and from nothing to do, she taught him to read, write, count to one hundred, and even dance a square dance. When Pelagia died, the orphan Vanka was sent to the people's kitchen to his grandfather, and from the kitchen to Moscow to the shoemaker Alakhin. “Dear grandfather, and when the gentlemen have a Christmas tree with gifts, take me a gilded nut ... at the young lady Olga Ignatievna for Vanka.

Have pity on me an unfortunate orphan, otherwise everyone will pound me and I want to eat passion. And don’t give my harmony to anyone. I remain your grandson Ivan Zhukov, dear grandfather, come. " Vanka put the letter in an envelope and wrote the address: “to the grandfather’s village”. Then he scratched himself, thought and added: "To Konstantin Makarych." Satisfied, Vanka “ran to the first mailbox and put a precious letter in the slot ... Lulled by sweet hopes, he slept soundly an hour later ... He dreamed of a stove. Grandfather sits on the stove with his bare legs dangling and reads a letter to the cooks ... A loach walks around the stove and twirls his tail ...