“Oh my,” exclaims the woman with shorn white hair and sherry-colored eyes as she stands by the kitchen window. “It’s fruitcake weather!”
So begins Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” — well, sort of. It’s the sentiment the book begins with, as seven-year-old Buddy and his 60-something-year-old “friend” — they are each other’s only friend — go on a journey to bake 30 fruitcakes and send them to friends they’ve barely or never met (including President Roosevelt).
The book actually begins with the words: “Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago.” And it unfolds slowly, but somehow also quickly, through time.
Capote weaves, as only he can, a tale of saving pennies, foraging for pecans and heading to the swamp to buy an illegal bottle of whiskey from an intimidating man named Mr. Haha Jones. The two unlikely misfits bake their cakes, send them off and then get about the real business of Christmas: cutting down a tree and exchanging gifts. They’ve selflessly spent all their money on fruitcakes, including the whiskey and postage to far-flung locations (Borneo!), so the ornaments are handmade — construction paper cats, fish, watermelons and angels adorned with the tin foil from Hershey Bars — and their tinsel is cotton they harvested in August for the occasion.
The gifts, too, are handmade. But more on that later.
The short story is copyrighted 1956, but the first time I read it was in December 2011. Our good friends, Kris and Tom, invited my husband and me, as well as Irene, another close friend, for dinner to share their newfound tradition of reading it aloud. We passed the book around in a circle. Kris fed a bottle to our baby daughter, just six weeks old.
Kris discovered the story quite by accident while visiting the home of a friend’s mother. The house had nostalgia, Kris told me, a little Grey Gardens-y, like it had a grandeur that had been left behind. She was browsing a bookshelf and pulled it down. She read it in one sitting — and fell in love.
“It seemed to me like a story that was the essence of everything I want to believe about the world — and certainly the holidays,” she told me recently.
The next year, she took the story to a friend’s intimate holiday gathering and they passed the book around, each person reading a page or two. The year after that was 2011. We loved the story so much that we took a copy to our family’s celebration on Christmas Eve and read it aloud for the second time that season.
Now comes the part of my story where, if this were a movie, you’d see calendar pages turning and turning, flipping year past year.
There was the time — 2012 — when the five of us feasted on ham and scalloped potatoes, ending the meal with a fruitcake from Balthazar. In 2014, having a toddler at home, my husband and I hosted for the first time: roasted pork shoulder, baked polenta and a kale salad. (Irene always loved kale salad.) By 2018, the group of five friends expanded to include two more families — and it was the first time Joe and Suzie hosted. Scalloped potatoes, again, but also brisket with gremolata and a killer chocolate cake. Our daughter was old enough to participate in the reading (and the chocolate cake).
Every year, as we read, we’d notice a new turn of phrase to admire.
I am a fan of Capote’s lists. Buddy tells us what gifts he’d like to buy for his friend, had he the money: “A pearl-handled knife, a radio, a whole pound of chocolate-covered cherries (we tasted some once, and she always swears: ‘I could live on them, Buddy, Lord yes I could — and that’s not taking his name in vain.’)” I also love when Buddy describes what his friend has never done, besides go to the movies: “She has never: eaten in a restaurant, traveled more than five miles from home, received or sent a telegram, read anything except funny papers and the Bible, worn cosmetics, cursed, wished someone harm, told a lie on purpose, let a hungry dog go hungry.”
Tom always loves the scene with Mr. Haha.
“Footsteps. The door opens. Our hearts overturn. It’s Mr. Haha Jones himself! And he is a giant; he does have scars; he doesn’t smile. No, he glowers at us through Satan-tilted eyes and demands to know: ‘What you want with Haha?’”
And everybody loves the ending — though no one wants to read it aloud.
“Nobody wants to be the last person,” Kris said. “You start to look at how many pages are left — is it going to be me?”
The ending has to do with those gifts, so again, more on that later.
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In 2015, Kris, who is an artist, took the tradition to another level: She created an installation and a happening around the story.
In an empty storefront window in Nyack, New York, she imagined the kitchen that Buddy and his friend baked in. Dressed in a blue-and-white checkered cloth, her “A Christmas Memory” table was brimming with pecans, currants, walnuts and whiskey. A bowl of flour, a cylinder of baking powder, a Ball jar of sugar. The movie “A Christmas Memory” (no, don’t watch it, it’s not very good) was projected on the wall behind, and the book propped up on a stand. Every night Kris would sneak down and turn a page to the next one so passers-by could read the story.
“We read it because that’s what (Christmas) is supposed to be about,” Kris told The Journal News and lohud.com at the time. “The pure act of people who have no money spending all their money on the dearest ingredients. They’re spending every dime they have to give to people they’ve met once … I think that’s the best story out there about the season.”
To celebrate small acts of kindness around the village, she and a few volunteers baked 31 fruitcakes — the recipe based on ingredients in the story — and invited people to nominate neighbors to receive them.
“It’s that person you wave to every day but don’t know their name,” she told the paper. “Someone who’s done a small act of kindness. … here’s a fruitcake to acknowledge that we’re both human beings.”
It brought the whole village together — even one of its most famous residents. When Kris and the volunteers were baking the cakes at the Nyack Center, a community building downtown, Bill Irwin, the actor, showed up and helped cut construction paper oranments — cats and fish. (Kris is friends with his wife, Martha Roth.) They passed the book around and read the story.
“We passed it around,” Kris remembered, “But asked ourselves: ‘Why are we letting anyone else read but Bill Irwin?’”
She delivered the cakes on Jan. 6 — Epiphany. The woman who worked at the deli got one. The activist who founded a skateboard park did too. So did the water meter reader.
“Most people were like, ‘Thanks a lot — who the hell wants a fruit cake,’” laughed Kris. “But they were yummy — they did not suck! They were boozy and that made up for a lot.”
We continued to gather, year after year. In 2019, the other of the newer families — Keith and Moriah — hosted, and invited a new guest who was an old friend: the daughter of the woman in whose house Kris discovered the book. We passed the story around, waiting to see who would have to read the ending, choking back tears.
Buddy and his friend don’t have any money to buy each other gifts. So they make them.
“She would like to give me a bicycle,” Buddy narrates. “(She’s said so on a million occasions): ‘If only I could, Buddy. It’s bad enough in life to do without something you want; but confound it, what gets my goat is not being able to give somebody something you want them to have.’”
Instead, she makes him a kite. Just as he is building her one. Just like the year before, when they made each other slingshots.
The next morning, they fly them. “Buddy, the wind is blowing.” Then the last page begins.
“This is our last Christmas together.”
It was our last Christmas together, too.
In 2020, we couldn’t bear to Zoom “A Christmas Memory.” In 2021 — we had an invitation to Keith and Moriah’s, but at the last minute, they cancelled, fearing COVID.
But “A Christmas Memory” marches on, anyway — through time, unfolding slowly, but somehow also quickly.
This year, I asked my daughter if she remembers reading “the Truman Capote story.”
“The what?” she asked.
“A Christmas Memory.”
Oh, yes, she did.
“Do you remember what it’s about?” I asked.
“This boy, and this woman?” she says, a question in her voice. “And she dies?”
Yes.
“And they make some cookies for people?”
“No, fruitcake.”
But she got the sentiment.
Liz Johnson is senior director for features for the USA TODAY Network’s Atlantic Group.
Twitter: @sourcherryfarm
Email: johnson@northjersey.com
