Incredibly this is the first time I’ve read works by Capote in over 20 years – and it has been way too long. I had forgotten how beautiful his prose is, how he had honed his craft to a quite extraordinary degree. This is a beautiful collection of reminisces (perhaps embellished a little for effect) of his childhood in a poverty-stricken 1930s Alabama, in particular, his Christmases which were the centre of his treasured memories of his close relationship with his elderly cousin known as Nanny.

The Christmas message and spirit is beautifully captured in the tender reflections of their excitable and heartfelt preparations for Christmas – not that they could afford copious gifts and seasonal trimmings – but one that was nevertheless full of love and anticipation.

There’s more than a tinge of sad memory and loss, as if Capote lost the true meaning of Christmas when he left behind Nanny. As if the determined making of her Christmas present each year from the pennies he had meant more to him than any of his glittering triumphs later in life.

Capote is also tremendous at bringing to life the town and its characters (this publication has a few other short stories from this time too). Whether it’s the bullying he received from other boys, local bootleggers, or the memory of a tragic accident outside, Capote captures a world in a moment in time and make sit sparkle like a Christmas snow globe. Incredibly moving. These stories should be as well associated with Christmas as Dickens’ Christmas Carol.

An autobiographical adventure that peeks into the life of Capote, weaved expertly and honestly. These small tales are capable of taking us back to the precious childhood memory we all hold on to.

What a wonderful book. Perfect for all ages, this is a book filled with childhood memories of times long since past. It is definitely a book to treasure and keep as it’s made up of short stories filled with love and tenderness. This is my first time to read it, but like a Christmas Carol I will return to this book again and again. Definitely a Christmas classic. Thanks to #NetGalley for my copy of this edition.

This collection consists of six short stories by Truman Capote published between the 1940s and the 1980s. Capote died in 1984.

Perhaps the most notable is its title story, A Christmas Memory. Set in the 1930s rural South with its main protagonists being a seven year old boy and his sixty-something cousin. It is a convincingly loving and nostalgic look at the relationship between the two with the Christmas preparation rituals as a prop. You can tell that Capote really took great enjoyment in writing this and going back to that time. The story in fact is heavily autobiographical as Capote was shipped off by his separated parents to his mother's relations and there he formed a unique bond with his older cousin "Sook". The balance between of sweetness, humour and nostalgia is perfect and the prose is really a delight.

Next up we have another autobiographical story set in Capote's childhood and again featuring Sook: A Thanksgiving Visitor. This one though is much more heavily moral in its tone and the wisdom of hindsight casts a long shadow over the storytelling. Not quite as perfect as the Christmas one for me, a little more formulaic and of its time in its evident moral message, but a good story all the same.

Staying on the theme of festivities and childhood reminiscences, we have One Christmas. This time young Truman's avatar is called upon by his absentee father to spend Christmas together in New Orleans. Not everything goes to plan. The story reminded me a lot of John Cheever's Reunion (1962): an adult man's narration of his memory of meeting the absent father and the child's realisation that the father is a pathetic and desperate drunk. I liked it, not as well realised as Cheever's though. I got a definite sense that this story was a lot more painful for the author to write than the previous two - possibly because by this point Capote had turned into a version of his father (the story was published in 1983, one year before he died of liver disease).

With Master Misery the subject matter has completely shifted and is the demarcation to the second part of the book which has a less autobiographical tone and a much more Southern gothic feel to it. It talks of a young woman who has moved to New York to live her dreams and slowly sees them been taken away...literally. This was the weakest story in the collection in my opinion: the scaffolding a little too evident, unconvincing characterisation and excessive symbolisation.

Children on Their Birthdays instead was very good, very evocative and memorable, rich and ingenious in its exposition. Perhaps unsurprisingly it was turned into a movie (as was One Christmas). The story centres around a young girl who comes into town and revolutionises the status quo and is told from the perspective of one of its young residents. Again childhood features as an important time in life, one which carries intrinsic magic power to it.

Finally comes Jug of Silver, another good story with a vein of sadness to it. Themes are of magic and childhood again, fate and luck. The Jug referred to in the title is the object of desire of the whole town and beyond. Who ever can guess the value of the total coins in the jug when counted on Christmas Eve, gets to keep its contents.

So overall, you can't go wrong picking up this book and digging into it, it will reward you and stay with you. Perhaps even more so if read during the festive season.


Many thanks to Penguin Classics and NetGalley for sending me an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is an author I have heard of but never really picked up a book of. When I saw that a reprint was to be out (last year), I got myself an advance copy. I obviously did not read it in time for the season, but given the year and few months we have been having, I do not think it makes much of a difference.
This is a collection of stories, something I did not expect (having not remembered the blurb), and it took me a while to acclimatize myself to the format. Most of them are supposed to be autobiographical, but the last two did not make much sense, moving to a different character. The first was heart-felt and felt like the narrations of a child. This does not often come through when the child in question is a precocious one. In this particular set of collections, there is no doubt of the innocence and emotions of a child trying to figure out his world.
There are multiple Christmassy situations, each with a different plotline and overall an easy read. I liked the flow and would have read it faster if not for the random story slipped in into the end. There are sad undertones to Buddy's life, but that is more visible to us as readers and not to the child experiencing them. The focus is on other things, things more important to him. I liked this experiment and would recommend it as a not-so-light read.
I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

I started reading this short story collection around Christmas but then it languished part-read on my Kindle until I finally picked it back up recently. I do enjoy Capote’s writing but I did find this collection a mixed bag. There are six stories in the book – some entirely fiction and some autobiographical. I found that some stories were overly sentimental for me and I struggled to connect with them but I did enjoy a couple of the stories. I would say that while the stories are all set around Christmas that this could be read any time of year. I think I’m going to try re-reading this over Christmas at some point in the future as I think I might get more out of it on a second read.

Mixed, but more than worth it for the two best stories - this review is appallingly late, but reading this in early December made me feel very effectively Christmassy.

“As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”

Seven-year-old Buddy inaugurates the Christmas season by crying out to his cousin, Miss Sook Falk: "It's fruitcake weather!" Thus begins an unforgettable portrait of an odd but enduring friendship between two innocent souls--one young and one old--and the memories they share of beloved holiday rituals.
This is a lovely little collection of Christmas stories that bring back all the nostalgia. This story recounts one of Capote’s Christmas childhood memories of an unlikely friendship. Buddy and Sook were such beautiful characters and it definitely made me think about my Christmases with my family when I was younger and makes me feel very grateful for what I have.
I must add that I wasn't too sure what was going on with the story of Sylvia, there didn’t seem to be much of a Christmas reference in that story. The second half of the book was quite confusing, I couldn’t tell if it was still Buddy narrating. I would have loved to have read more about Buddy and Miss Sook.
Having said that, I loved the beginning and the feelings of Christmas traditions and the joy of spending Christmas with the people you love.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for gifting me a copy in exchange for an honest review.

Truth v emotional truth…

This is a short collection of six stories, some of them autobiographical, others fictional. A couple of them are set at Christmas, while Thanksgiving and birthdays make appearances in others. For me, the collection was divided strictly down the middle. The three autobiographical ones were overly sentimental, veering perilously close to mawkishness, and full of preachy moral lessons the young Capote learned from his wise but childlike elderly cousin. The three fictional ones, however, were excellent – emotional, certainly, but with an underlying feeling of truthfulness that I found sadly lacking in the autobiographical ones. Since it’s a short collection, here’s a brief idea of each story:

A Christmas Memory – here we meet young Buddy, as the child Capote was known, as he and his cousin prepare for Christmas. There is much baking of cakes and collecting of boughs to decorate the house, and so on. The impression is of a rather lonely child, living with elderly relatives because of some family problem. The elderly cousin, here unnamed, is dismissed by her siblings as somewhat simple, but to Buddy she has retained her childlike innocence and sense of joy in life. It’s beautifully written, but too sentimentalised to ring wholly true.

A Thanksgiving Visitor – now we learn that the elderly cousin is called Miss Sook, and that the family problem is the separation and divorce of young Buddy’s parents, each of whom has gone off to live his or her own life leaving Buddy in the care of relatives. In this one, Buddy is being bullied by a boy at school, and Miss Sook sets out to deal with the issue by inviting the boy to Thanksgiving dinner, much to Buddy’s horror. Buddy behaves badly, and is taught a moral lesson that will stand him in good stead for life. My contemporaneous note about this one contained the words “self-pitying” and “trite”.

One Christmas – in this last of the autobiographical stories, Buddy’s father decides the boy should spend Christmas with him in New Orleans. Buddy barely knows his father, and has to travel hundreds of miles all alone to stay with this stranger. We learn more about his parents in this one, and if true (and I have no reason to doubt it) they were a pretty appalling pair. Buddy behaves rather badly, and when he gets home Miss Sook teaches him a moral lesson, blah, blah, blah. This one tipped right over into mawkishness, leaving me feeling as if I’d seriously over-indulged in Christmas cake. I was glad to move on to the fictional stories!

Master Misery – this is a strange, sad and rather haunting story of a young woman who leaves her small town to come to New York, full of dreams of how wonderful life will be there. But of course it isn’t, and she finds herself in a dreary job with no spare money for fun. So when she hears of a man who will pay to have other people’s dreams related to him, she goes to see him. There’s a mystical edge to this, although it never quite tips over into the supernatural. It’s a kind of allegory on the difficulty of keeping dreams alive when faced with the harshness of reality. Beautifully written, emotional in a good way, and thought-provoking.

Children on Their Birthdays – the story of Miss Bobbit, a little girl who comes to stay in town. She dresses oddly and behaves like an imperious grown-up lady, and two of the boys in the neighbourhood are so smitten with her that their lifelong friendship is broken by their mutual jealousy. That’s where the story starts, not where it ends. The ending, in fact, is told to us at the beginning – Miss Bobbit dies, run over by a bus. However, the real emotion of the story is in the boys’ friendship rather than their feelings for the girl. It’s a wonderful depiction of the hormonal angst of teenage boys discovering girls for the first time.

Jug of Silver – this is probably the least overtly emotional story in the collection and a rather more cheerful one to end on. As a publicity stunt, the owner of the local drug store fills a jug with coins and promises to give it on Christmas Eve to the customer who guesses nearest to the total in the jug. A poor little boy called Appleseed is determined to win, but first he has to find the money to buy something in the store to qualify for a guess. He comes every day to stare at the jug, and says he’s counting the coins. The story itself is enjoyable, but the real interest is in the depiction of small town life, with some lovely descriptions of the preparations for Christmas.

The whole thing reminded me rather of the Avonlea-based short stories of LM Montgomery: warm, full of moral lessons and with a love of small town life, and walking that dangerous tightrope between emotionalism and mawkishness. For me, Montgomery manages the balance better, and her insertion of humour lifts the overall tone. There’s not a lot of humour in this collection and a good deal too much self-pity. I feel harsh saying that, because if “Buddy’s” depiction of his parents is authentic, then he had some reason to feel sorry for his younger self, though it would seem he lived a pretty pampered life in material terms in comparison to the poverty of many of those around him. But he milks it too much for my taste, I fear. Overall, I gave each of the three fictional stories five stars, but the autobiographical ones only managed to scrape a generous three apiece.

I read this collection of short stories in an attempt to get myself into the festive spirit after the rough year 2020 turned out to be. Whilst it was an enjoyable read, I wouldn't categorise it as particularly festive. The stories are set at Christmas time but don't necessarily hinge on that. That is not a weakness but actually a strengthen of the collection. I would happily pick this collection up throughout the year rather than saving it as a Christmas read. The title story is the stand out and worth getting a copy of the collection for that one alone. All in all, a really pleasant read.

A collection of short stories/memories from Capote’s rural childhood.

I had the bad luck of working right through the Christmas period (Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day) and wanted to read something festive on my breaks. I read this collection and it was a joy.

I was apprehensive about reviewing this in January however despite the title I didn’t find this very Christmassy. The tales are set around Christmas but could’ve been read at anytime.

The writing was phenomenal and so beautiful. It has definitely made me want to read more by Capote.

Lovely stories with incredible writing but ultimately forgettable.

A copy of this book was provided by NetGalley for an honest review.

A wonderfully festive read. It is true to Capote's distinctive short style. Really engrossing. I really loved it!

The title story is a gem; I’d read it before in my copy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It and “A Thanksgiving Visitor,” are said to be autobiographical, about Capote’s Alabama upbringing in the 1930s and his close relationship with an elderly cousin, Miss Sook. With the meager funds available to them, they make several dozen whiskey-soused fruitcakes to give away for Christmas. Sook teaches “Buddy” to think the best of others, even the bully who’s made his life so difficult. I also liked the late story “One Christmas,” in which Buddy spends the holidays in New Orleans with the father he barely knows. “Master Misery” is an odd but appealing fantasy tale of a young NYC career girl who discovers a man who pays for dreams. The last two stories didn’t engage me; I mostly skimmed them to the end.

A beautiful, soulful collection of memories from the southern states of USA. A young person’s recollection where children are to the forefront and who are the best ambassadors for this holiday season.
It made me reflect on the stories of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and the wonderful characters writers can fashion out of kids, their turn of speech and idiosyncratic ways.
A sense of hard times abounds amount these communities but nothing gets in the way of tradition, neighbourliness and sense of belonging.
Each story is well crafted you feel transported to another world, see the barrenness and the hick towns. Sense the harsh weather and dusty roads while being enveloped in the spirit of struggle and perseverance.

Christmas is a wonderful time, regardless of embracing its spiritual roots. As this book of stories demonstrates it is about one’s responsibility to others, a generous heart and an united bond across family and community.

At a time of great upheaval and restrictions on our own way of life and celebrations this gem of a book by a renowned author warmed my heart.

A deconstructed kind of Christmas; Capote's collection of short stories offer a bittersweet, nostalgia-driven account of disillusionment and loneliness.

A Christmas Memory starts as if already half way through a story, creating a sense of being with a friend.

Despite first being published in 1956, Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory still feels incredibly relevant and current. As Buddy describes the experience of making fruitcake, they also mention in passing a horse & cart and the 1880s, but these details could be swapped with the 2000s and cars and the warm, nostalgic feelings of Christmas traditions would remain.

I found this a poignant read and a much needed discovery in what has been a difficult year for all.

Truman Capote was known for his bitchy aphorisms and love of hard liquor and pills, plus the creation of the glamorous powder-room girl Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's. A Christmas Memory is one of my favourite short stories/novellas of his, telling with complete sweetness and lack of artifice the story of a young boy and his 'friend', a misfit older aunt figure who doesn't get everything quite right but is the one person who loves him unquestioningly.

I was so ready to love this book. I really enjoy reading festive books around Christmastime and I love finding books that I can revisit year upon year. But this book didn't have the Christmas magic that I was looking for, well at least not when it got going.
I found the beginning rather charming. The idea of making fruitcakes every year for almost everyone you know really seemed to capture the Christmas spirit. I enjoyed reading about Buddy and Miss Sook. They are the most interesting characters in my opinion.
But it wasn't long before racism started to show. The main character, as well as many of the other characters, don't look at BIPOC as people and it was rather horrible to read. Hardly any BIPOC are named and many of them described in rather horrible ways. This continues for the rest of the book and for this reason I wouldn't recommend this book.
I know that people will probably read this review and think that this book was written a while ago and therefore times were different, but this book was originally published in 1956 which is still rather recent. Also just because it was published a while ago, does not mean that it's contents are acceptable and shouldn't be discussed.
I won't be adding this to my Christmas reading list each year.

Looking at the cover and title of this book, I was expecting a festive read and, given the time of year, I was delighted to be approved for this galley. These short stories, however, were more unsettling than they were festive. While I didn't leave this collection ready to bake cookies and sing Christmas carols, I wasn't disappointed because the writing in this book was just so good.

Capote was a masterful wordsmith whose writing can immediately put you into a time and place. The first 3 stories had recurring characters and were told from slightly differing perspectives which each revealed another layer - these 3 stories taken together were my favourite in the collection. The remaining stories were more on the surreal side, I didn't always know what was going on but one thing that remained constant and kept me grounded in the collection was the quality of Capote's writing.

There were some turns of phrase which didn't sit well with me due to their racist undertones and while I understand this would have been a product of the time Capote was writing in, it left me with a bitter aftertaste. I also struggled to concentrate at times when things got really weird. All that being said, I am glad I read this and if you're someone who wants an alternative to cheesy, schmaltzy Christmas books this would be an excellent choice which will transport you into the strange and wonderful worlds Capote creates.

A Christmas Memory is a collection of six short stories by Truman Capote. The majority of the stories are based on his memories of growing up in Alabama during the Depression era.

The stories that feature his elderly, unmarried cousin, Miss Sook, are the most touching of the collection. After reading the first story, no reader, will be able to bake a Christmas cake without thinking of the care and delight that Miss Sook and Buddy (her name for Capote) took in pulling together the ingredients for the many cakes, that they would make each year, for those that they considered to be their friends. Capote’s writing style is superb, not a single word is wasted, but with each one, that he carefully selects, he paints a vivid picture of the scenes from his childhood. You can clearly visualise each character and their surroundings but also the atmosphere and the feeling of the time.

The only negative is that the memories do reflect how a young boy would have seen that time in America. Rosa Parks has not yet decided to refuse to sit at the back of a bus, and Martin Luther King recognised that parts of Alabama, were still in 1963, some of the most segregated parts of the USA. In one of the stories a young black girl is tormented by two white boys, who seem to imply that they think they should be able to take her into a barn for some forced activities. Thankfully another girl intervenes. The N-word is used as part of this scene in the story. I would have preferred the whole book far more if this story had not been included, and as there is very little mention of Christmas within the tale, it would not feel like a great loss to those that want a Christmas book, if the story had not been included. At the same time though it did bring to life what that time period was like to live in, and Harper Lee of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ fame was a childhood and lifelong friend of Capote. It made me appreciate Lee’s character of Scout, in both of the novels that she features in, even more, as it becomes clear how much of a stand she would have had to have taken in order to have advocated for equal treatment for all in that time and place.

The collection of memories does end on a high, which shows the poverty that Alabama’s lived through at this time, but with a heart-warming ending, that will make you feel ready for Christmas. I will certainly re-read several of these stories each Christmas and I love the cover of this Penguin Classics version. I’m sure with some slight re-writing and beautiful illustrations that a number of these stories could be turned into a children’s classic. At the moment though, it provides a chance for us adults to be transported back into the Christmas joy of being a child at Christmas again.