33 pages • 1 hour read
Truman CapoteA Christmas Memory
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1956A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Sustaining Love and Friendship
“A Christmas Memory” depicts a loving friendship between two outsiders, and the story celebrates the pair’s ability to emotionally sustain themselves and each other in an unsympathetic environment. The narrative quickly establishes that Buddy and his friend not only have no say in their house but also are actively chastised and repressed: “Other people inhabit the house, relatives [… who] have power over us, and frequently make us cry” (4). A young child without parents, and an “aging spinster” considered “loony” by her family—both Buddy and his friend would be condemned to loneliness without each other.
While the pairing of a seven-year-old boy and a “sixty-something” woman might initially appear humorous or improbable, Buddy and his friend share a deep, loving friendship that sustains them both; the two share every task and plan, they sacrifice for each other and comfort each other, and they have fun together. Buddy and his friend have no desire to recreate a “family” relationship; they could easily have referred to each other as aunt and nephew or even as cousins. That they do not adopt such familial titles—preferring the simple names “Buddy” and “my friend”—perhaps reveals how deeply both have been disappointed by their families, and their desire for a less oppressive bond. They value connection and community even as it eludes them; loyal to each other, they also treat their dog Queenie as a fellow “friend,” and each Christmas they seek to expand their circle of friends through their gifts of fruitcakes to “people who’ve struck our fancy” (14). Outside of their oppressive household, Buddy and his friend try to form an alternative kind of community, one that is affectionate and open to other social outsiders like the “sinful” Haha.
The power of this friendship is evident on Christmas morning. Buddy is bitterly disappointed in the impersonal gifts from his other relatives (“It makes me boil. It really does” [25]), and he regrets being unable to buy his friend any impressive Christmas presents. But after flying kites with his friend, his bitterness and regret disappear:
Satisfied, sun-warmed, we sprawl in the grass and peel Satsumas and watch our kites cavort. Soon I forget the socks and hand-me-down sweater. I’m as happy as if we’d already won the fifty-thousand-dollar Grand Prize in the coffee-naming contest (26).
Although they are isolated from (and neglected by) their other relatives, their friendship is enough to sustain them.
This relationship’s critical importance is proven by the story’s ending. Sent to military school by his other relatives, Buddy feels adrift from any sense of stability or comfort: “I have a new home too. But it doesn’t count. Home is where my friend is, and there I never go” (27). In turn, the health of Buddy’s friend rapidly declines, as she is “[a]lone with Queenie. Then alone” (28), she no longer has the strength to maintain their Christmas traditions. The narrative portrays her death almost as the inevitable result of her separation from Buddy. Many coming-of-age narratives require that their protagonists sacrifice a childhood illusion to gain entrance into the adult world, but in Buddy’s case, the death of his friend and the end of his childhood represent a pure loss with no accompanying gain. He can only cherish his memories of his friend and hope to reunite with her one day; he ends the story “searching the sky” for an image of the two of them as “a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven” (29).
Suffering, Loss, and the Preciousness of Transient Experience
Suffering and loss run throughout “A Christmas Memory,” disturbing even the story’s happiest moments. In the first pages, the threat of death looms already in varied places: Buddy’s friend remains “pitifully hunched” as the result of a severe childhood illness; she has named him “Buddy” after a friend who died as a child (4); and their dog, Queenie, “has survived distemper and two rattlesnake bites” (6). In planning their journey to cut down a Christmas tree, Buddy’s friend thinks about her father, who died many years ago (18), and she dreads the day when Buddy will have grown up and left her behind (24). Among the most overt gestures toward death is when Buddy interrupts his description of a perfect Christmas morning to note that in the pasture, “a winter hence, Queenie will be buried, too” (26).
These reminders of loss serve multiple purposes within the narrative. They foreshadow the story’s ending, in which Buddy is separated from his friend and she passes away soon after. The resolution of “A Christmas Memory” is not Buddy’s perfect morning of kite-flying with his friend but a moment of emotional devastation after his friend’s death: “a piece of news some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken string” (29).
However, these reminders of death and loss also render the certain plot events all the more precious. The narration’s presage of Queenie’s eventual death, for example, overtly underlines the fragility and transience of Buddy’s idyllic Christmas morning beside his friend. This “Christmas memory” is so important to Buddy precisely because it is the “last” one he shared with his friend before her death (27), this awareness of death and loss heightens his appreciation for the time he spent with his friend as a child. Buddy’s friend makes a similar point when the mill owner’s wife tries to badger her into giving up her Christmas tree; the wealthy woman insists the friends can just “get another one. In answer, my friend gently reflects: ‘I doubt it. There’s never two of anything’” (21). Having lost her childhood friend and father, Buddy’s friend has the wisdom to cherish what she does possess. Although “A Christmas Memory” recounts a magical holiday shared by two loving friends, the story is also about the experience of loss—Buddy’s loss of his friend and the accompanying loss of his childhood identity—and how the inevitably of loss demands an appreciation of each shared moment.
The Disparate Expression of Religious Faith
“A Christmas Memory” contrasts the generous religious faith of Buddy’s friend with the cold Christianity of his other relatives. At first, the story only hints at his friend’s religious beliefs; she admires a Baptist missionary who delivered a lecture in town (14), and she is careful not to take the Lord’s name in vain (22). However, the seriousness and depth of her faith is revealed in the story’s climatic scene when she flies kites with Buddy on Christmas morning. In this scene, she reveals that she has often thought deeply about the nature of God and what it would be like to finally encounter “Him”; she imagines God as a loving figure and “a comfort” who takes away all the pain and fear at the moment of death. Appropriately for Christmas Day (also called “Epiphany” in the Christian church), Buddy’s friend experiences a further revelation (an epiphany) that shifts her understanding of God. Rather than viewing God as a distant figure accessible only after death, she decides that she has already seen God revealed in the ordinary things of the world: “I’ll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things just as they are […] just what they’ve always seen, was seeing Him” (27). Her belief in God’s active presence in the world is affirming and comforting to her: “As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes” (27). Her faith is sincere and all-encompassing, imbuing everyday life with a sense of divine beauty and significance. Her faith is also, notably, an active one; she performs generous and charitable actions throughout the story, including not only her preparation and distribution of the 31 fruitcakes at Christmas but also her continual care of Buddy.
In contrast to his friend’s quieter faith, Buddy’s relatives express their faith loudly, but they do so to shame others rather than to cultivate their own relationship with any divine figure. In scolding Buddy’s friend, they express a theology of condemnation in which God is harshly judgmental, punitive, and receptive only to “begging” for forgiveness: “Listen to what [the relatives] have to say, the worlds tumbling together in a wrathful tune: ‘[…R]oad to ruination! remember Cousin Kate? Uncle Charlie? Uncle Charlie’s brother-in-law? shame! scandal! humiliation! kneel, pray, beg the Lord!’” (17). The phrase “wrathful tune” casts doubt on the motivations of this theology; here, there is no comforting, loving God like the one imagined by Buddy’s friend. Additionally, the cries of “ruination,” “scandal,” and “humiliation,” suggest that Buddy’s relatives are far more concerned about the family’s outward appearances than they are about their cousin’s soul. Buddy’s relatives follow a religion of social propriety, in which places like Haha’s “fish-fry and dancing café” are condemned as “sinful” (11). These upright relatives are stingy and neglectful; they hardly interact with Buddy, and on Christmas morning he receives “socks, a Sunday school shirt, some handkerchiefs, a hand-me-down sweater and a year’s subscription to a religious magazine for children. The Little Shepherd” (25). Once again, the relatives’ Christianity is publicly displayed in Sunday school shirts and magazine subscriptions, but it lacks the loving kindness that shapes the Christianity of Buddy’s friend.
“A Christmas Memory” ends with an image of “a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven” (29); in imagining heaven or the divine, Buddy pictures it as a reunion with his lost friend. The story suggests that it is the loving example of his best friend that underlies Buddy’s faith.
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By Truman Capote
