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A Christmas Memory | Introduction

"A Christmas Memory" was issued by Random House in 1966 during the holiday season in order to capitalize on Truman Capote's growing popularity following the release of his true-crime novel, In Cold Blood. Though "A Christmas Memory" had initially appeared in Mademoiselle magazine in December, 1956, and was reprinted in The Selected Writings of Truman Capote in 1963, it was the 1966 edition that established the story's enduring popularity. The story of a seven-year-old boy and his aging cousin's holiday traditions was made into an Emmy Award-winning television movie starring Geraldine Page in 1968 and continues to be produced by high-school and regional theaters throughout the United States.

The story is a prime example of what William L. Nance in The Worlds of Truman Capote calls Capote's ''fiction of nostalgia," in which the author looks back fondly upon his Southern childhood. These nostalgic stones evoke a gentle, simple, and secure childhood uncorrupted by the complications of adulthood. Autobiographical elements in "A Christmas Memory" are apparent: Capote lived with relatives in the South as a child, and during this time his older female cousin, the childlike Sook Faulk, was his closest companion. The nostalgic mood has prompted some critics to dismiss the story as "saccharine." However, the story also contains darker elements such as loneliness, poverty, social isolation, and death, which demonstrate that the innocence of childhood may protect young people from the elements of the human condition, but not remove them from it. The story is also an example of a common theme in Capote's writings: the friendship forged among social outcasts, many of which are eccentric women.

A Christmas Memory Summary

The narrator of the story tells the reader to ''imagine a morning in late November" more than twenty years ago. The scene is a kitchen of a rambling house in a small rural town in the 1930s. An elderly woman stands at the kitchen window and proclaims that "it's fruitcake weather!" This is delightful news to her seven-year-old cousin and best friend, Buddy. "Fruitcake weather" signals the beginning of the holiday season for the unconventional cousins, who bake the loaves for the people in their lives who have been kind to them through the year. The two proceed with their tradition more or less oblivious to the other relatives who live in the house: "they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, [but] we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them."

They begin the routine by gathering pecans for the fruitcakes. The unnamed woman and the little boy, accompanied by their dog Queenie, spend three hours filling an old baby carriage with the nuts that have fallen on the ground in the neighbor's orchard. Then they return to the kitchen to shell the nuts by firelight and plan the next day's work— buying the other ingredients for the fruitcakes. Later, they go up to the woman's bedroom, where she keeps a change purse hidden under her bed. The purse is filled with the money they have accumulated all year from their various enterprises: selling fruit and flowers,... » Complete A Christmas Memory Summary