The friends spend a day laboriously collecting pecans that have already been shaken loose from the trees of a nearby orchard. Today, it will carry their harvest of pecans. Though it is nearly falling apart, the buggy has been a stalwart companion, a serviceable container for the many things they like to collect from the woods and fields-flowers, ferns, firewood, and more. They also bring a run-down baby carriage that belonged to Buddy shortly after he was born. The two head outside to collect the pecans needed for the recipe, accompanied by their beloved dog Queenie. This announcement marks the beginning of the Christmas season, as every year the two start their Christmas preparations by baking fruitcakes for their friends. We are each other’s best friend” (4).īuddy’s friend suddenly exclaims, “t’s fruitcake weather!” (4). Other people-relatives-live with them in this house, but “though have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them.

This friend, a distant cousin of the narrator’s, calls him “Buddy” after a “boy who was formerly her best friend” who died in the 1880s. At the window stands his “best friend,” a woman who is in her sixties but “still a child” (4). Though largely narrated in the present tense, the story is a series of the narrator’s memories, beginning with the seven-year-old narrator sitting in the kitchen of a large old house in a rural town. The story opens with a first-person narrator instructing the reader to “magine a morning in late November more than twenty years ago” (3), setting the story in the early 1930s. This guide refers to the 2007 Modern Library edition of “A Christmas Memory.” “A Christmas Memory” has attained the status of a holiday classic, with television adaptations appearing in 19.

In recounting this odd couple’s dedicated holiday preparations-which include baking 31 fruitcakes to give away to their eccentric collection of friends, felling and decorating an enormous Christmas tree, and exchanging handmade kites-the story reveals the sustaining love shared between two social outsiders. “A Christmas Memory” returns to the rural Alabama setting of the author’s childhood to recount a magical Christmas season shared between the seven-year-old “Buddy” and his cousin, who is in her sixties (and to whom Buddy, the narrator, refers only as “my friend”).

A midcentury author with a clear and evocative prose style, Capote is remembered for his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and for his groundbreaking work of true-crime nonfiction, In Cold Blood (1966). Originally published in Mademoiselle magazine in December 1956, “A Christmas Memory” remains one of Truman Capote’s (1924-1984) most anthologized short stories.

A christmas memory 1966