Books like One Christmas

Not all Christmases can be wonderful, and this Christmas for Buddy (Truman Capote) was a bitter-sweet one because he didn't get to spend it with his cousin Miss Sook but was sent to visit his father whom he hardly knew.Miss Sook told him that perhapse there would be snow in New Orleans. Neither of them had ever seen snow, but Miss Sook loved it as Buddy had said, “Sook read me many stories, and it seemed a lot of snow was in almost all of them. Drifting, dazzling fairy tale flakes.” Of course there was no snow in New Orleans, which was a disappointment to him. His father was happy to see him, and when he picked him up at the bus station, he was laughing and crying and then asked him, “Don’t you know me?” But that night Buddy just prayed to be home.His father had already bought him a Christmas tree, which I felt should have been something that they should have done together, but at least they went into town to buy the ornaments for it. What an estranged family, I thought. A mother who was not around, who left him in order to go to college and then got a job in New York. A mother who also said that his birth had destroyed her, which comment also destroyed him. Some things, like this, you just never get over. How hard it must have been for him to put this memory down in this Christmas story, that is, unless this story had been all made up. At least, I thought, “A Christmas Memory,” although also bitter-sweet, was mostly sweet. And then there was his dad: a man who drank a lot, and was a charming womanizer who married old women for their money. Miss Sook had told him about Santa Claus, and so Buddy believed in him. Santa with his “flowing beard, his red suit, his jangling present-filled sled.” He believed in him just as he believed in God, and he prayed to both. He prayed to Santa to bring him a gift that he saw in a store window when he was shopping with his father.His father had a big party where Buddy ate his first oyster and said, “It was like a bad dream sliding down my throat.” I can understand this, as I felt that way when I ate my first and only oster. The butter that was on it did not help. Mushrooms are like that too. Both of them are like eating uncooked dead goldfish. His father was like that oyster, at least to me, as Buddy was learned how his dad operated.And his father wanted his love and asked him if he loved him; he wanted him to live with him also. Buddy wouldn’t tell him that he loved him, and he refused to live with him. When Buddy got home he sent his father a post card, and in that card he told him that he loved him. When his father died, Buddy found that post card in his dad’s safety deposit box. When my father died, I had gone to pick up his belongings. All that was left were some clothes and a few other items, but then I found a photograph album with photos of all us kids. Memories are far and few between when there is a divorce in the family. It was nice to know that our father had loved us in his own way, but sad to see that his life had little to show for it. Update: I edited my review after reading this book again, and actually I didn’t read it, I listened to it, and the narrator, Reynolds Price, was excellent, but what is more, the book sounded different to me this time because Capote’s writing stood out to me more when it was read aloud for some reason. Capote was such a wonderful writer.