It seems at first that these simple activities of a single Christmas season are the “Christmas memory” of the story’s title. The narrator recalls these events as happening “more than twenty years ago.” On one level, there is very little to the story: Buddy and his cousin make 31 fruitcakes to give to friends they chop down and decorate a Christmas tree they exchange homemade gifts on Christmas morning. The other Buddy died in the 1880’s, when she was still a child. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. The stories are autobiographical, inspired by his childhood among mother’s relatives in Monroeville, Alabama, where he had been sent as a toddler after his parents’ divorce.Ī Christmas Memory, the best of these three, is luminous with the friendship between the then-seven-year-old narrator and his elderly, intellectually disabled, cousin: So it may be a surprise to many to learn that Capote wrote three holiday stories, A Christmas Memory, One Christmas, and The Thanksgiving Visitor. Truman Capote today is most remembered for his horrifying true-crime novel In Cold Blood and tale of modern rootlessness in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (unlike the movie, Capote’s novella does not end happily). Truman Capote’s short story, “A Christmas Memory,” meditates on the role of memory around the holidays.
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