A Christmas Memory

In depicting Buddy and his friend’s Christmas rituals, “A Christmas Memory” celebrates the humble, overlooked, and rejected. With little money and no support from their relatives, Buddy and his friend’s ability to produce 31 decadent fruitcakes and an enormous, extravagantly decorated Christmas tree that looks “good enough to eat” (22) at first seems like a Christmas miracle. However, these achievements are not miraculous; they spring from Buddy and his friend’s insight into the potential of materials that others reject. Though they have few resources of their own, they recognize hidden value in even humble objects and employ perseverance and creativity to transform the unwanted into sources of beauty and pleasure. This special ability is first established through the description of Buddy’s baby carriage; like everything the pair owns, the carriage is “dilapidated” and “rather unraveled.” However, Buddy and his friend appreciate the carriage for its endurance and even personify it as an affectionate friend, noting that it is “a faithful object” (6).

In winter, the carriage provides the means to collect the “windfall pecans” for the Christmas fruitcakes, another symbol of Buddy and his friend’s ability to transform the leftover and rejected into something sustaining and pleasurable. Windfall pecans are not the first crop of pecans; they are the rejected pecans remaining after “the main crop” has been “shaken off the trees and sold by the orchard’s owners, who are not us” (6). Buddy notes that these leftover pecans are difficult to find and that the labor of collecting them from the ground is backbreaking, but the two persist in collecting enough pecans for 31 fruitcakes. The Christmas fruitcakes evidence the pair’s ability to transform the humble into the extravagant through persistence and ingenuity, and they are a literal labor of love, valuable not only for their “melting, nose-tingling odors” (14) but also for the effort and determination poured into each one.

Buddy and his friend similarly create a magnificently decorated tree even though they “can’t afford the made-in-Japan splendors at the five-and-dime” (21). They carefully gather and preserve materials that others might consider useless—“coils of frazzled tinsel gone gold with age […] dilapidated, undoubtedly dangerous candy-like light bulbs […] saved-up sheets of Hershey-bar tin foil” (21-22)—and “sit for days at the kitchen table with scissors and crayons and stacks of colored paper” (21), transforming these scraps into glittering decorations. The two of them “fashion” joy out of leftovers, and while their other relatives seem to resent and discourage any demonstrations of excess or excitement (16-17), Buddy and his friend nevertheless find ways to express generosity and creativity.

Indeed, even when Buddy and his friend cannot physically or creatively overcome their financial limitations, they still transform ordinary objects into priceless gifts by imbuing them with love and affection, demonstrating the story’s overarching theme of Sustaining Love and Friendship. Buddy and his friend both express strong frustration for the first time in the story when they realize that they cannot buy each other Christmas gifts; Buddy’s friend even considers stealing a bike for Buddy because “what gets my goat is not being able to give somebody something you want them to have” (23). However, the tension and regret that both feel at having “only” made each other a kite dissolves the night before Christmas when Buddy’s friend “squeezes [his] hand I-love-you” and confesses, “‘I tried to sell my cameo Papa gave me. Buddy’—she hesitates, as though embarrassed—‘I made you another kite’” (24). Recognizing the love in his friend’s confession, Buddy is relieved, and the two simply laugh at their predicament. On Christmas morning, Buddy deems his kite “beautiful […] blue and scattered with gold and green Good Conduct stars” (26).

This idea, the exaltation of lowliness, culminates in Buddy’s friend’s epiphany in the story’s climactic scene, as she insists that even the most ordinary things possess extraordinary value as evidence of God’s presence. She always imagined God as a remote, impressive figure, “pretty as colored glass with the sun shining through” (27)—however, as she flies kites with Buddy on Christmas morning, her idea of God realigns to resemble something closer to their homemade kites, ordinary but imbued with love:

‘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’ (27).

Buddy’s friend sees the presence of God in the everyday, natural world (“things as they are”). Even base, unaltered “earth” and “bone” are revelations of God’s presence.

This epiphany is a culmination of the story’s loving portrayal of the humble and rejected, and this attention to the disregarded applies not only to objects and the natural world but also to the characters. Because it is told from Buddy’s point of view, the narrative emphasizes the extraordinary value of a woman whom others dismiss and overlook. Condemned by her family as a “shame” and a “loony,” Buddy’s friend possesses an unassuming, even “pitiful” appearance: “A woman with shorn white hair […] due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched […] her eyes are sherry-colored and timid” (4). However, Buddy’s narration looks beyond this humble exterior to reveal a woman of “remarkable” generosity, kindness, and strength: a woman who gives away mountains of fruitcakes, cares for an abandoned child, and fells a tree with “thirty hatchet strokes” (20). While Buddy’s friend comes to recognize the presence of God in “things as they are,” it is through his friend that Buddy experiences Christmas and imagines a connection to the divine, picturing his own soul as a kite “hurrying toward heaven” (29).

Finally, while children’s perspectives are often disregarded and dismissed by adults, “A Christmas Memory” embraces Buddy’s viewpoint, suggesting that he understands and values his friend far more accurately than any of his other relatives do. Appropriately for a Christmas story, the narrative celebrates those who recognize the worth of the humble and “childlike.”