Bright trees, warm fires, thick, gooey love – Christmas is an opportunity for joy and happiness as the world turns dark and grey. For a young boy called Buddy and the old woman that is his best friend, Christmas is the embodiment of good things. She has dealt with poverty and illness and grief. He will struggle through misery and orders and loneliness. That one Christmas, however – the one filled with love and happiness and fruitcake – that Christmas is golden for both of them. In “A Christmas Memory,” Truman Capote shows via indirect characterization and the use of traditions that memories enable people to relive their past lives - a coping mechanism for the present.
The indirect characterization of other people shows that the woman’s …show more content…
His childhood, though not always easy, was full of warmth and happiness from his best friend – especially at Christmas time. Buddy explains the regularity of his holidays, saying “It’s always the same: a morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year […] announces: ‘It’s fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat’” (Capote 1). His winters are always the same, and the consistency helps create strong memories. Because of the reliability of his Christmas traditions, Buddy has a powerful memory to recall and remember in his uncertain future. After Buddy leaves the small house he grew up in, crowded with poverty and apathy, he starts another life. However, his heart remains at his old home, as at the end of the story he says “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” (Capote 7). Buddy is forced into the rigors of military school, and the cold, impersonal environment is vastly different from the small gem of unconditional love and warmth he found at his old home. The separation between the two parts of his life are only bridged by the remembrances of better times. He remembers the joy and excitement of those Christmas traditions all those years ago, and he hangs on to those
The indirect characterization of other people shows that the woman’s …show more content…
His childhood, though not always easy, was full of warmth and happiness from his best friend – especially at Christmas time. Buddy explains the regularity of his holidays, saying “It’s always the same: a morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year […] announces: ‘It’s fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat’” (Capote 1). His winters are always the same, and the consistency helps create strong memories. Because of the reliability of his Christmas traditions, Buddy has a powerful memory to recall and remember in his uncertain future. After Buddy leaves the small house he grew up in, crowded with poverty and apathy, he starts another life. However, his heart remains at his old home, as at the end of the story he says “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” (Capote 7). Buddy is forced into the rigors of military school, and the cold, impersonal environment is vastly different from the small gem of unconditional love and warmth he found at his old home. The separation between the two parts of his life are only bridged by the remembrances of better times. He remembers the joy and excitement of those Christmas traditions all those years ago, and he hangs on to those