33 pages • 1 hour read
A Christmas Memory
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Symbols & Motifs
Fruitcake
The fruitcakes are densely symbolic. For Buddy, they symbolize Christmas itself, as his friend’s annual pronouncement that “it’s fruitcake weather!” is what “inaugurat[es] the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze of her heart” (5). Rich, decadent, full of “oh, so much flour, butter, so many eggs, spices, flavorings” (7), the fruitcakes are an extravagant celebration of the Christmas season.
However, the fruitcakes also physically represent his friend’s enduring determination, generosity, and desire for community. The story gradually reveals that Buddy’s friend leads a very circumscribed life, with her choices and actions limited both by her status as an older unmarried woman and by her family’s scapegoating and stinginess; she has little money, no means of transportation, few possessions, and receives no encouragement from her relatives. Yet through determination and “imagination,” she conjures 31 fruitcakes to celebrate Christmas; the fruitcakes symbolize her ability to transcend and perhaps even rebel against these familial and social limitations.
For Buddy and his friend, the fruitcakes further symbolize their desire for a more supportive network of “friends” outside of the control of their relatives. Buddy and his friend create an alternative community for themselves by gifting these fruitcakes to whomever they like, including “merest acquaintances.” This gift-giving may seem naive and childish (they even mail a fruitcake to President Roosevelt), but these gifts spring from an authentic generosity and desire for connection.
Whiskey
Whiskey symbolizes both generosity and forbidden pleasure in “A Christmas Memory,” and its role in the story reveals the ways in which Buddy and his friend fail to meet their relatives’ standards of propriety. Although Buddy describes his friend as a deeply religious woman with a “timid” demeanor, she does not hesitate to break the law (the story is set during Prohibition, a period when the sale of alcohol was banned in the United States) or defy “public opinion” to acquire the whiskey she needs to bake her fruitcakes. This pursuit of whiskey reveals his friend’s determination to preserve her Christmas traditions and bring others pleasure even in the face of social disapproval. Whiskey is a subversive substance in the story, associated with the town’s “sinful” dancing café and its non-white owners (the “Indian” man Haha Jones and his wife [16]). However, Haha proves himself a kind man, and after drinking some of the whiskey, Buddy and his friend engage in celebratory singing and dancing in the kitchen, feeling “warm and sparky” (16). For Buddy’s other relatives, however, this scene represents “shame! scandal! humiliation!” (17). This scene of conflict demonstrates how their relatives seek to repress joy, individuality, and expressiveness in the name of family honor and propriety; they even condemn Buddy’s friend as “loony” for her behavior.
Kites
Kites support the theme of Sustaining Love and Friendship, symbolizing the loving and joyful friendship between the story’s central pairing. Buddy describes the pair as “champion kite-flyers” who “can get a kite aloft when there isn’t enough breeze to carry clouds” (23), affirming the pair’s ability to overcome deprivation through skill and creativity. Both Buddy and his friend are at first disappointed that they cannot afford to buy each other Christmas presents and can only make each other homemade kites as gifts, but this disappointment fades when they both confess “I made you another kite” and then laugh at their predicament (24). Their sincerity transforms the simple gifts into tokens of friendship, and both are pleased to exchange them on Christmas day. The kites illustrate how the pair’s friendship allows them to rise above their circumstances; Buddy recovers from his disappointing Christmas morning by flying kites with his friend, and his friend experiences a religious epiphany while watching their kites “cavort[ing]” in the sky.
At the end of the narrative, the kites take on additional symbolism, as Buddy imagines his friend’s death as a loss of his own childhood identity, or an event “severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken string” (29). Buddy ends the story imagining his childhood self—symbolized as a kite—accompanying his friend’s heart (or soul) on her journey to the afterlife: “I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven” (29). Kites thus have multifaceted significance, variously symbolizing the close identification and relationship between Buddy and his friend, the impossibility of Buddy recovering his childhood self after the death of his friend, and even a spiritual yearning toward the afterlife.
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