Suddenly, jangling the coins in his hand like a fistful of dice, his face softens. We pay him with nickels and dimes and pennies. Haha Jones goes from being a fearsome figure to a friend when he refuses payment for his whiskey: Haha Jones to purchase contraband whiskey for their fruitcakes. Buddy and his cousin make their way with trepidation to the café of Mr. In one instance, the giving of a gift establishes a friendship. Others-such as the “skin-flint” relatives in the household on whom Buddy and his cousin are dependent-remain nameless. With few exceptions, the only people named in the story are these true friends who are honored with a gift of fruitcake. Winston, who took the only photograph of Buddy and his cousin.
#Christmas memories by truman capote driver#
Buddy and his cousin exchange gifts with their “truest friends,” people who have shown them kindness and given their own gifts-such as Abner Packer, the driver of the six o’clock bus who daily exchanges waves with them. The constant unsettling of temporal frame of the story elevates memory itself as one the most important themes of the story.Īnother important theme of A Christmas Memory is the importance of gift-giving as an aspect of friendship. He recalls Christmas seasons of his adolescence-indeed, the story ends on a “particular December morning” neither that of the seven-year-old Buddy nor the man twenty-some years removed from that boy. His cousin likewise recollects the Christmases of her childhood.īuddy-as-narrator amplifies his description of his seven-year-old self and his cousin with commentary from his adult perspective, reminding us that the narrated events are remote in time, place, and sensibility from his present.
The holiday is special for reprising the rhythms of previous Christmases. Seven-year-old Buddy, for instance, makes frequent reference to his Christmases past, going back to the year he was four years old. But remembrances across the years unsettle the temporal frame of the story. 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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