It's Christmas Eve. An octogenarian, abandoned in a wheelchair and on the verge of death is found outside a retirement home in "The Blizzard of the Century". He's brought inside but his identity is a mystery. While administrators try to find out who he is, he befriends Sal, the facility's emotionally unstable head janitor. They pass the time by playing Scrabble, but this is no ordinary game. Isolated from the outside world, the power goes down and the temperature inside plunges, but they continue to match wits by spelling words -- words that have a devastating effect on real life world events both in the present and the past.