Truman Capote’s story, “A Christmas Memory,” is the best way I know of to launch the holiday season. It is perfectly delightful, calorie-free, and costs nothing unless you buy a copy to give as a gift (you can find it in many editions of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, with a couple of other stories). Need a free sample before you make the commitment? In the following excerpt, 7-year-old Buddy and his friend, an elderly female cousin, go out to select the family Christmas tree:
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. Soon, by the edge of knee-deep, rapid-running water, we have to abandon the buggy. Queenie wades the stream first, paddles across barking complaints at the swiftness of the current, the pneumonia-making coldness of it. We follow, holding our shoes and equipment (a hatchet, a burlap sack) above our heads. A mile more: of chastising thorns, burrs 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 pitchblack 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. On the farther shore, Queenie shakes herself and trembles. My friend shivers, too: not with cold but enthusiasm. One of her hat’s ragged roses sheds a petal as she lifts her head and inhales the pine-heavy air. “We’re almost there; can you smell it, Buddy?'” she says, as though we were approaching an ocean.
And, indeed, it is a kind of ocean. Scented acres of holiday trees, prickly-leafed holly. Red berries shiny as Chinese bells: black crows swoop upon them screaming. Having stuffed our burlap sacks with enough greenery and crimson to garland a dozen windows, we set about choosing a tree. “It should be,” muses my friend, “twice as tall as a boy. So a boy can’t steal the star.” The one we pick is twice as tall as me. A brave handsome brute that survives thirty hatchet strokes before it keels with a creaking rending cry. Lugging it like a kill, we commence the long trek out. Every few yards we abandon the struggle, sit down and pant. But we have the strength of triumphant huntsmen; that and the tree’s virile, icy perfume revive us, goad us on. Many compliments accompany our sunset return along the red clay road to town; but my friend is sly and noncommittal when passers-by praise the treasure perched in our buggy: what a fine tree, and where did it come from? “Yonderways,” she murmurs vaguely. Once a car stops, and the rich mill owner’s lazy wife leans out and whines: “Giveya two-bits cash for that ol’ tree.”
Ordinarily my friend is afraid of saying no; but on this occasion she promptly shakes her head: “We wouldn’t take a dollar.” The mill owner’s wife persists. “A dollar, my foot! Fifty cents. That’s my last offer. Goodness, woman, you can get another one.”
In answer, my friend gently reflects: “I doubt it. There’s never two of anything.”
Having spent this Thanksgiving walking the woods of North Carolina, I can tell you that Capote knows his way around a Southern pine forest. We didn’t have more than a touch of frost in the mornings, and instead of a renegade hog we had the sound of coyotes yipping after dark. Still, nearly everything else was there: an abandoned beaver dam, briars, burrs, a close call in which Daddy nearly slid into the creek, and a sunset return up the back path.
Things were exciting indoors, too. Evidently there is in my family a genetic inability to place a full pumpkin pie in the oven without sloshing a half-cup of filling into the floor or onto the open oven door. Mama and I laugh too much to do things neatly and properly.
It doesn’t spoil a thing, though. Yes, the side of the pie where the filling spilled over the crust got a good bit darker than it should have. Yes, Ernesto tore his hand on a briar, and one of my shoes got mired up with black creek mud. But it’s so much more memorable that way, to enjoy things as they are.
“You know what I’ve always thought?” [my friend] asks in a tone of discovery and not smiling at me but a point beyond. “I’ve always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through, such a shine you don’t know it’s getting dark. And it’s been a comfort: to think of that shine taking away all the spooky feeling. But I’ll wager it never happens. I’ll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are”—her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone—”just what they’ve always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”
Lovely!