The buggy is mine that is, it was bought for me when I was born. Together, we guide our buggy, a dilapidated baby carriage, out to the garden and into a grove of pecan trees.

The hat is found, a straw cartwheel corsaged with velvet roses out-of-doors has faded: it once belonged to a more fashionable relative. Help me find my hat.’Ī cheery crunch, scraps of miniature thunder sound as the shells collapse and the golden mound of sweet oily ivory meat mounts in the milk-glass bowl. It’s always the same: a morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze of her heart, announces: ‘It’s fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Oh, Buddy, stop stuffing biscuit and fetch our buggy. And there were no birds singing they’ve gone to warmer country, yes indeed. ‘The courthouse bell sounded so cold and clear. ‘I knew it before I got out of bed,’ she says, turning away from the window with a purposeful excitement in her eyes. The other Buddy died in the 1880s, when she was still a child. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. Other people inhabit the house, relatives and though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived together – well, as long as I can remember. The person to whom she is speaking is myself. ‘Oh my,’ she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, ‘it’s fruitcake weather!’ Her face is remarkable – not unlike Lincoln’s, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.Ī woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. 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. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. In the Deep South of Capote's youth, a young boy, Buddy, and his beloved maiden 'aunt' Sook forage for pecans and whiskey to bake into fruitcakes, make kites - too broke to buy gifts - and rise before dawn to prepare feasts for a ragged assembly of guests while in other stories, a lonely woman has a troubling encounter in wintry New York and an unlikely festive miracle, of sorts, occurs at a local drugstore.īrimming with feeling, these sparkling tales convey both the wonder and the chill of Christmas time.Imagine a morning in late November. Selected from across Truman Capote's writing life, these Christmas stories range from nostalgic, semi-autobiographical portraits of childhood to more unsettling tales of darkness beneath the festive glitter. 'It should be,' muses my friend, 'twice as tall as a boy.

Tender and bittersweet, these stories by Truman Capote, the author of Breakfast at Tiffany's,Īre a captivating tribute to the Christmas season

Christmas memories by truman capote