No, he glowers at us through Satan-tilted eyes and demands to know: 'What you want with Haha?'”Īnd everybody loves the ending - though no one wants to read it aloud. Haha Jones himself! And he is a giant he does have scars he doesn’t smile. Buddy tells us what gifts he’d like to buy for his friend, had he the money: “A pearl-handled knife, a radio, a whole pound of chocolate-covered cherries (we tasted some once, and she always swears: ‘I could live on them, Buddy, Lord yes I could - and that’s not taking his name in vain.’)” I also love when Buddy describes what his friend has never done, besides go to the movies: “She has never: eaten in a restaurant, traveled more than five miles from home, received or sent a telegram, read anything except funny papers and the Bible, worn cosmetics, cursed, wished someone harm, told a lie on purpose, let a hungry dog go hungry.” Our daughter was old enough to participate in the reading (and the chocolate cake).Įvery year, as we read, we’d notice a new turn of phrase to admire. Scalloped potatoes, again, but also brisket with gremolata and a killer chocolate cake. (Irene always loved kale salad.) By 2018, the group of five friends expanded to include two more families - and it was the first time Joe and Suzie hosted. In 2014, having a toddler at home, my husband and I hosted for the first time: roasted pork shoulder, baked polenta and a kale salad. There was the time - 2012 - when the five of us feasted on ham and scalloped potatoes, ending the meal with a fruitcake from Balthazar. Now comes the part of my story where, if this were a movie, you’d see calendar pages turning and turning, flipping year past year. We loved the story so much that we took a copy to our family’s celebration on Christmas Eve and read it aloud for the second time that season. The next year, she took the story to a friend’s intimate holiday gathering and they passed the book around, each person reading a page or two. “It seemed to me like a story that was the essence of everything I want to believe about the world - and certainly the holidays,” she told me recently.
She read it in one sitting - and fell in love. She was browsing a bookshelf and pulled it down. The house had nostalgia, Kris told me, a little Grey Gardens-y, like it had a grandeur that had been left behind.
Kris discovered the story quite by accident while visiting the home of a friend’s mother. Kris fed a bottle to our baby daughter, just six weeks old. Our good friends, Kris and Tom, invited my husband and me, as well as Irene, another close friend, for dinner to share their newfound tradition of reading it aloud. The short story is copyrighted 1956, but the first time I read it was in December 2011. They’ve selflessly spent all their money on fruitcakes, including the whiskey and postage to far-flung locations (Borneo!), so the ornaments are handmade - construction paper cats, fish, watermelons and angels adorned with the tin foil from Hershey Bars - and their tinsel is cotton they harvested in August for the occasion. The two unlikely misfits bake their cakes, send them off and then get about the real business of Christmas: cutting down a tree and exchanging gifts. Capote weaves, as only he can, a tale of saving pennies, foraging for pecans and heading to the swamp to buy an illegal bottle of whiskey from an intimidating man named Mr.
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