"A Christmas Memory"

When I read this story by Truman Capote as a teenager, it didn’t make much of an impression.  Reading it again recently, I dismissed it at first as a “nice, sentimental story,” but really nothing of significance.

I know better than that though.  There is always something of significance to be found in the texts that humans produce, even if they are unintended, sometimes especially if they are unintended.  In “A Christmas Memory” there is, of course, the irony of the seven-year-old boy and the 60+-year-old woman, who is “still a child,” being best friends, and there is the pathos of the two marginalized family members clinging to each other’s companionship.  But beyond irony and poignancy, where is the significance to be found?

In rereading and rethinking the story, I noticed that while the first-person narrator is called by the nickname “Buddy,” we don’t know his real name (though we assume it is the author), and the woman, his distant cousin, is never named.  Buddy refers to her throughout as “my friend.”  The other “relatives” in the house are also unnamed, but they are the ones who seem to occupy the center of the household, in which Buddy and his friend are outsiders.

The lack of names for the relatives can be explained from the perspective of the narrator and his friend:  “…though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole too much aware of them.”  But why the lack of specific identity for the two main characters?  Perhaps their namelessness underscores their status as near outcasts in the family (at least in their eyes).  Could part of the significance lie in the importance of belonging and community, even if it is a family community, to individual identity?  As Buddy and his friend turn to each other to reinforce their sense of self, we recognize the formative power of relationships.  Though their family situation is sad, the two characters experience great joy and delight together.

And it is this irony which brings us to the larger significance of the story.  While there are religious references in this “Christmas” story, there is no mention of Christ’s birth, though such a reference would fit well with the larger pattern in the narrative of life and light emerging from darkness.

Christ’s birth, however, is less important than the season of the natural year, the darkening days, the coming winter solstice, and the return of the sun’s light.  The most meaningful religious pattern in the story is more pagan than Christian.

This pantheistic theme is reinforced by the most explicit religious reference in the story when Buddy’s friend exclaims, while gesturing toward “clouds and kites and grass”:  “I’ll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself.  That things as they are…just what they’ve always seen, was seeing Him.  As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”

And, years later, when Buddy learns of his friend’s death, on a December morning, it is the kites they made for each other their last Christmas together that he imagines “rather like hearts…hurrying toward heaven.”

Like the rebirth of light in the midst of winter’s darkness, it is the memory of human joy and delight two unlikely friends created together that somehow brightens the reality of death and loss.

Thus does “A Christmas Memory” reenact the ancient mythic theme of spring emerging from winter, light from darkness, and life from death.  Such is the significance of the story, and in that spirit, I wish you all a most Happy Winter Solstice!

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

Robert Frost’s familiar verse (see previous post) may be the best known Winter Solstice poem, though it may not always be recognized as such.

The speaker of the poem makes his stop on “the darkest evening of the year,” presumably the longest night of the year, the Winter Solstice. He stops to look into someone else’s woods, woods that are “lovely, dark, and deep.” Is he merely pausing among those promises he has to keep to admire nature’s beauty or does his own heart’s desire to stop, to sleep, to die, resonate with the depth of winter?

Freudians have read a death wish into the poem, but I read it as a human parallel to nature’s cycle, which brings us to the brink of death each December, before reversing itself and returning us to the light. Similarly, we may experience our own seasonal or situational depressions, even suicidal thoughts, but just as our own “promises to keep” restore us to life, so does nature keep its promise to us, to light, and to life.

Yet the tone of the poem is not triumphant, joyful, or celebratory of the return of light and life. Those “promises to keep” seem more obligatory than anticipatory. The speaker sounds more resigned to living than expectant or hopeful

In the same way, nature makes no great show at this time of year. It defers its outward celebration to spring and the full flower of summer. The hard price of joy and hope may be the simple will power it takes to fulfill our responsibilities, meet our obligations, and keep our promises.

Robert Frost was no Pollyanna when it came to representing human experience. His father was an abusive alcoholic, two of his children died early, one at age four and one in infancy, another daughter preceded him in death after long suffering, a son committed suicide, his sister and another daughter were hospitalized for mental illness. (See the Lawrence Thompson biography.) Tragedy, death, and suffering were no strangers to Frost.

His poems about family life were starkly realistic, not sentimental; his nature poems acknowledge the brutality as well as the beauty of nature (see previous blog post on “Design,” June 29).

He would have known how the joyful celebrations at the season of the Winter Solstice—the artificial lights, the decorated trees, the brightly colored gifts, the bountiful feasts—are achieved by many obligatory acts of keeping the promises of the season. He would have known from harsh experience how the annual holiday orgy serves as a colossal cultural and psychological defense against the fears, the losses, the sadness and the resignation that also accompany the season.

Nature keeps its promise according to rote each year. How many of us go through the motions of decorating, shopping, wrapping, caroling, cooking and raising our glasses to toast each other while masking an inner desire for hibernation in woods that are “lovely, dark, and deep”? Yet it is the effort to keep those promises, meet those obligations, and fulfill those responsibilities, the sheer will power of living that is ultimately rewarded by genuine moments of joy, hope, and celebration in life.

Frost’s poem does not capture such a triumphant moment, but it does capture a positive one in the contemplation of “easy wind and downy flake” and in the affirmation of those “promises to keep” and “miles to go” at life’s darkest time.

And so, at this time of the Winter Solstice, whatever tragedies, losses, and mere sadness beset you, may the blessings of life also be upon you.

A Poem for the Winter Solstice

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost, 1923