40 Fun Facts About A Christmas Memory

What do the narrator and his elderly friend bake by the dozen each winter in A Christmas Memory?

Fruitcakes take the pair four days to bake, and most are mailed to people they have met once or never at all.

Which handmade present do the narrator and his friend make each other for their last Christmas in A Christmas Memory?

Kites are all the pair can afford, so each builds one in secret, though a few years earlier they had traded slingshots. They fly them together on Christmas Day.

How is the elderly woman in A Christmas Memory related to the seven-year-old boy who narrates the story?

His cousin, a distant one in her sixties, is also his best friend, and Capote modeled her on the relative who helped raise him in Alabama.

Which president do the pair in A Christmas Memory mail a homemade gift every year without ever meeting him?

Franklin Roosevelt is the most famous name on a mailing list made up mostly of strangers and people the pair have met only once or twice.

Which future novelist lived next door to young Truman Capote in the Alabama town behind A Christmas Memory?

Harper Lee remained Capote's lifelong friend and put him into To Kill a Mockingbird as the character Dill.

Which ingredient must the pair in A Christmas Memory buy illegally because of Prohibition?

Whiskey could not be sold legally, so the two carry a purse of hoarded pennies to a dive whose owner has a fearsome reputation.

Where is the young narrator of A Christmas Memory sent the year after his last Christmas with his friend?

Military school separates them for good: the two write constantly, but her mind fails and she dies before they can meet again.

Random House reissued A Christmas Memory in 1966 to ride the success of which Truman Capote bestseller?

In Cold Blood had just made Capote a celebrity, and the boxed holiday edition, not the first printing a decade earlier, made the story a classic.

Which nickname does the friend give the narrator of A Christmas Memory, whose real name is never told?

Buddy is the only name readers ever learn for him, and Capote said the boy was a portrait of himself.

What is the name of the little rat terrier who goes everywhere with the pair in A Christmas Memory?

Queenie trots along on the nut-gathering trip, and news of her death eventually reaches the narrator in one of his friend's letters.

Which nuts do the narrator and his friend gather from a neighbor's orchard floor in A Christmas Memory?

Pecans cost the pair nothing because they pick up only what the harvest left on the ground, then shell them by firelight that evening.

Which present does the elderly friend in A Christmas Memory long to buy the narrator but cannot afford?

A bicycle is as far out of reach as the knife, radio and chocolate-covered cherries he would like to buy her, so they make their presents instead.

Why do two angry relatives scold the narrator's friend once the baking is finished in A Christmas Memory?

She let the boy drink the last of the bottle with her. After the scolding she cries in her room until he cheers her with talk of finding a tree.

Which Christmas present does the family dog in A Christmas Memory receive every single year?

A bone is her gift every year, and on the last Christmas of the story she is busy burying it in the pasture while the two friends talk.

Which national crisis explains the poverty of the household in Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory?

The Great Depression is never named in the story, but its early-1930s setting shows in the coins the pair hoard: their whole baking fund comes to about thirteen dollars.

From which point of view is A Christmas Memory told, so readers never hear the friend's thoughts?

First person narration lets an adult look back through a seven-year-old's eyes, which is why even the stern relatives go unnamed.

In which month does A Christmas Memory open, as the friend declares that the baking season has arrived?

November brings the ritual every year, and after the two are parted she still posts him the best of each batch until she grows too frail.

What do the pair in A Christmas Memory push to the orchard to carry home their nut harvest?

An old baby carriage, bought for the boy when he was born, is their cart, and filling it with fallen nuts takes three hours.

What does the superstitious friend in A Christmas Memory do on the thirteenth day of every month?

Stays in bed is her rule for that date, and the pair once threw a penny out of the window rather than keep exactly thirteen dollars.

What does the fearsome bootlegger Haha Jones do when the pair in A Christmas Memory try to pay him?

Gives their money back is the surprise: the scarred giant, said never to smile, asks only for a share of their baking instead.

The friend in A Christmas Memory has never eaten in a restaurant, but which tiny birds can she tame?

Hummingbirds are one item on the boy's admiring list of her talents, beside telling chilling ghost stories and mixing home cures.

Why has the narrator's elderly friend in A Christmas Memory never once been to see a movie?

To save her eyesight for the day she meets God is her reason, so the boy goes alone each Saturday and tells her the plots afterward.

The narrator of A Christmas Memory spends each Saturday at the movies, which inspire him to become what?

A tap dancer is his plan, paid for by the one regular withdrawal from the pair's savings: a dime a week for his ticket.

In A Christmas Memory, which scraps supply the tinfoil for the angels the pair make for their tree?

Candy wrappers become angels that hang beside paper cutouts of fruit and animals and a few old treasures fetched from the attic.

Which present from the stern relatives leaves the narrator of A Christmas Memory bitterly let down?

A religious magazine for children, sent by subscription, arrives with hand-me-down clothes, and the boy admits the gift makes him furious.

Which fruit, one of the friend's own Christmas presents, do the pair share outdoors in A Christmas Memory?

Oranges, a sack of satsumas, are her best present that year, and she shares them with the boy on what proves to be their last Christmas together.

What does the friend in A Christmas Memory refuse to do with the pine she cuts for Christmas?

Sell it to a passerby she will not: told she could always cut another, she answers that no two things are ever the same.

The narrator's nickname in A Christmas Memory honors whom from his elderly friend's own past?

A girlhood playmate, who died in the 1880s, lent him the name, and near the end her failing mind can no longer tell the two apart.

How does the narrator of A Christmas Memory first know that his elderly friend has died?

He simply senses it before any message can reach him, a sign of how close the two remained after years of separation.

Which public radio show aired Capote's own 1959 recording of A Christmas Memory in 2003?

This American Life played a shortened cut of the LP that Capote had recorded three years after the story first appeared.

Which women's monthly first published Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory in its December 1956 issue?

Mademoiselle had also printed Miriam in 1945, the eerie tale whose success first won Capote a book contract.

Which Alabama town, Truman Capote's boyhood home, is the real setting behind A Christmas Memory?

Monroeville took Capote in at about age six, when he was left in the care of four elderly, unmarried relatives there.

Nanny Rumbley Faulk, the real woman behind the friend in A Christmas Memory, went by which nickname?

Sook is the name the screen and theater versions give the character, who is never named in the story itself.

A Christmas Memory was one of three stories bundled in 1958 with which famous Truman Capote novella?

Breakfast at Tiffany's shared its first edition with three shorter tales, and one scholar traced Holly Golightly back to the story's elderly friend.

Which Truman Capote sequel to A Christmas Memory pits the boy against a bully named Odd Henderson?

The Thanksgiving Visitor brought back the same boy and elderly friend, and its television version won the leading actress a second Emmy.

Which actress won an Emmy as the elderly friend in the 1966 television film of A Christmas Memory?

Geraldine Page played opposite a narration read by Capote himself, and the same performance reached cinemas in 1969 inside an anthology film.

Which actress, once Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, played the friend in the 1997 A Christmas Memory?

Patty Duke led the Hallmark remake opposite Piper Laurie, three decades after the first television version.

The 1966 TV film of A Christmas Memory won Emmys for its star and script, plus which broadcasting honor?

A Peabody Award citation called it one of the finest television hours of the year, faulting only the commercials that broke in at the wrong moments.

Composer Samuel Jones turned A Christmas Memory into which kind of one-act work, first seen in Dallas?

An opera in one act, it drew its libretto from both the story and the 1966 television script, and the composer later shaped an orchestral suite from it.

Although A Christmas Memory draws on his Alabama boyhood, in which Southern city was Truman Capote born?

New Orleans was his birthplace in 1924, but his parents' marriage failed and he was handed to his mother's relatives in Alabama.