Oh My! It’s Fruitcake Weather!

Using “A Christmas Memory” as an Invitation to Write

Photo by Monika Stawowy on Unsplash

Every December, I offer Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” as a gift to my class. The sharply-drawn characters, the precocious narrator, and universal emotions of love and longing makes this seasonal classic a perfect writing invitation for student writers.

Before he became commercially famous for Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), Capote published “A Christmas Memory” in 1956 as a stand alone story in Mademoiselle. In the short story, Capote is already working with the unique fictional and autobiographical blend that would become his contribution to the literary canon. Of the nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood, Capote said he wanted to write with “the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry.” 

Set in the Depression-era South, “A Christmas Memory” tells the story of Buddy, a 7-year-old boy, and his beloved older cousin, who is simply called “my friend.” The story starts as a quest to collect the necessary funds to buy all the ingredients to make fruitcakes and distribute them to far-away associates like President Roosevelt, two Baptist missionaries, a traveling knife grinder, and the local bootlegger. Once the cakes are mailed off, Buddy and his cousin drink the rest of the whiskey, raising the ire of angry relatives. They then hunt for a Christmas tree and make decorations. They secretly make each other kites for Christmas presents and fly the kites on Christmas Day. The story ends far into the future with the death of the elderly cousin and the nostalgia of Buddy who relays this memory from a cold December campus at a military school that he’s been sent to by “Those Who Know Best.” 

Instructions: 

• Make a list of five Christmas memories that represent or suggest something larger than the memory itself. 

• Choose one memory that has the most depth and potential for fictionalizing or choose one memory where something is achieved or made- a present found, a creche built, a play produced, a party assembled-that could serve as a goal to frame the story. 

• Make a list of two-five characters that occupy the center of the story. 

• Choose one goal the characters have in the story and follow them as they go about achieving the goal. 

• Choose one or two characters (or events) who might stand in the way of the goal. 

• Write out the memory quickly from beginning to end. Once you have a draft, consider revising with some of Capote’s craft moves below. 

Open with a series of imperative sentences that evoke sensory images of place. 

Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.

Use a list of idiosyncrasies that develops and deepens a character.

Here are a few things she has done, does do: killed with a hoe the biggest rattlesnake ever seen in this county (sixteen rattles), dip snuff (secretly), tame hummingbirds (just try it) till they balance on her finger, tell ghost stories (we both believe in ghosts) so tingling they chill you in July, talk to herself, take walks in the rain, grow the prettiest japonicas in town, know the recipe for every sort of old-time Indian cure, including a magical wart remover.

Use fragments and short phrases to illustrate scenery, paint the setting with colors, textures, sounds, and movement. 

Morning. Frozen rime lusters the grass; the sun, round as an orange and orange as hot-weather moons, balances on the horizon, burnishes the silvered winter woods. A wild turkey calls. A renegade hog grunts in the undergrowth. …..A mile more: of chastising thorns, burs and briers that catch at our clothes; of rusty pine needles brilliant with gaudy fungus and molted feathers. Here, there, a flash, a flutter, an ecstasy of shrillings remind us that not all the birds have flown south. Always, the path unwinds through lemony sun pools and pitch vine tunnels. Another creek to cross: a disturbed armada of speckled trout froths the water round us, and frogs the size of plates practice belly flops; beaver workmen are building a dam.

Use a cinematic framing with indirect, yet specific dialogue and staged distance to describe the action. 

Enter: two relatives. Very angry. Potent with eyes that scold, tongues that scald. Listen to what they have to say, the words tumbling together into a wrathful tune: “A child of seven! whiskey on his breath! are you out of your mind? feeding a child of seven! must be loony! road to ruination! remember Cousin Kate? Uncle Charlie? Uncle Charlie’s brother-in-law? shame! scandal! humiliation! kneel, pray, beg the Lord!

Use an epilogue-like ending that leaps into the future of the fictional story, told from the “now” of the memory. 

This is our last Christmas together. Life separates us. Those who Know Best decide that I belong in a military school. And so follows a miserable succession of bugle-blowing prisons, grim reveille-ridden summer camps. I have a new home too. But it doesn’t count. Home is where my friend is, and there I never go.

Use a symbol in the last sentence that references a significant relationship or moment earlier in the story. 

That is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.