Christmas Classics | Saying nothing in particular

Next on my list of favorite Christmas stories that have nothing to do with Santa, is this short story by Truman Capote.

It’s the story of a young boy and his elderly “friend” who set out with $12.99 to make thirty fruitcakes for people who have been kind to them or people they admire (like Eleanor Roosevelt). They are the wards of “persons” who “have power over us and often make us cry” but who for the most part ignore them and so over the years they have figured out how to entertain themselves and, at the same time, save a few pennies here and there for their Fruitcake Fund.

 "... a morning arrives in November, and my friend as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and the fuels the blazes of her heart announces: 'It's Fruitcake weather!'"

We know little else about them. The young boy remembers no other home and his friend has never traveled more than five miles from the house nor has she seen a movie or eaten in a restaurant … but she “has killed with a hoe the largest rattlesnake ever seen in the county (sixteen rattles) … tamed hummingbirds (just try it) till they balance on her finger … knows the recipe for every sort of old-time Indian cure, including a magical wart remover.”

She also knows how to make kites and fly them in any weather. The important things to a young boy.

Nor do we know much about where they live except that it is a “spreading old house in a country town.” There’s an orchard nearby where they gather “windfall pecans” from amongst the fallen leaves, a grocery where they buy “cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned pineapple from Hawaii, rinds and raisins and … oh so much flour, butter and so many eggs” which they load into his baby carriage (the thing he arrived in with little else) and drag home. However, for the most expensive ingredient they must summon their courage to visit a notorious bootlegger by the name of Haha Jones. Any guesses as to what that most expensive ingredient was?

Truman Capote aka Buddy and his friend Nanny aka Sook

Okay – it’s whiskey! Any of my baking blogger buddies use hard liquor in their fruitcake? I’m thinking of giving it a try. It’s been just that kind of year!

Me … after gobbling down too much spiked fruitcake.

Published by the Picture Book Studio of Austria

One of my treasures is a copy of The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry published in 1982 and illustrated by Lisbeth Zwerger. I treasure the book primarily because it is beautifully laid out (written in script!) and the illustrations are enchanting.

The story was written in the early 1900s by a fellow who wrote under the name O. Henry. He used other aliases as well, probably because he’d spent time in jail. That would be an asset in today’s publishing world but it definitely wasn’t in Victorian times. He also wrote The Ransom of Red Chief which inspired the Christmas classic Home Alone and came up with the terms The Cisco Kid, Banana Republic and Baghdad on the Subway.

For those of you who’ve never read The Gift of the Magi, Della has only managed to scrape together one dollar and eighty-seven cents to buy her beloved Jim a Christmas present. And so she sells her most prized possession. Given their dire financial circumstances, she probably should have bought something practical with the money she earned but she doesn’t. The irony is, Jim does the same thing and so they both end up with gifts they can’t use.

Or did they, as O’Henry postulates, receive the best gift that can be given?

The cemetery where O’Henry is buried reports that – for over thirty years! – they routinely find envelopes containing … one dollar and eighty-seven cents on his grave. Doesn’t that fill you with sobs, sniffles and smiles? It does me.