Every year at Christmastime, Buddy and his friend collect pecans and buy other ingredients to make fruitcakes although set during Prohibition, this includes whiskey, which they buy from a scary-but ultimately friendly- 'Indian' bootlegger named Haha Jones. The family is very poor, but Buddy looks forward to Christmas every year nevertheless, and he and his elderly cousin save their pennies for this occasion. Narrated by an unnamed, seven-year-old boy who is referred to as 'Buddy' by his older cousin, 'A Christmas Memory' is about the narrator's relationship with his older, unnamed, female cousin, to whom he refers throughout the story only as 'my friend.' (In later adaptations, she is called Sook.) Buddy and his cousin, who is eccentric and childlike, live in a house with other relatives-who are authoritarian and stern-and have a dog named Queenie.

Now a holiday classic, 'A Christmas Memory' has been broadcast, recorded, filmed, and staged multiple times, in award-winning productions. The evocative narrative focuses on country life, friendship, and the joy of giving during the Christmas season, and it also gently yet poignantly touches on loneliness and loss. But Capote later wrote a friend, I had an elderly cousin, the woman in my story 'A Christmas Memory,' who was a genius.' Nanny, whom everyone called Sook, was thought to be developmentally disabled.

The woman was Nanny Faulk, elder sister of the household where Capote's wayward parents deposited him as a young boy. The largely autobiographical story, which takes place in the 1930s, describes a period in the lives of the seven-year-old narrator and an elderly woman who is his distant cousin and best friend. It was issued in a stand-alone hardcover edition by Random House in 1966, and it has been published in many editions and anthologies since. Originally published in Mademoiselle magazine in December 1956, it was reprinted in The Selected Writings of Truman Capote in 1963. For a complete schedule of dates and times, please click here.'A Christmas Memory' is a short story by Truman Capote. This movie normally airs throughout the holiday season on the Turner Movie Classics Channel. Not currently, you can however purchase the book. The poverty of the 1930’s fails to stop or even slow down a loving relationship at a loving time of the year. Living with a slightly dotty but loving “cousin,” Capote remembers back to when he was about 10 years old and it was suddenly decided that “it was fruitcake weather.” The task of baking 30 cakes for mostly far away friends and other rituals of Christmas time are painted with such loving and nostalgic strokes, this becomes a truly beautiful Christmas experience. Emmy Award winning adaptation of Truman Capote’s recollection of his youth in the rural South during the Depression.

A christmas memory 1966