What Patience Can Bring at This Time of Year
Neil Mufson, Head of School
Each year at about this time, I re-read and re-savor my favorite winter holiday story, Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory. One of the things that makes for great literature is a text’s ability to say something timeless yet new each time it is read. Capote’s Depression era tale does that and has at its roots themes about kindness, gratitude, and patience, three of our Primary Day values.
Capote’s tale tells of the special relationship between Sook Faulk, an elderly spinster, and her best friend Buddy, her seven-year-old distant cousin. The plot revolves around their yearly routine of making fruitcakes to give as gifts to the special people in their lives. But beyond the story line, in marvelously crafted writing, lies the richness of their friendship, their love for each other, and their caring about others. Buddy also learns deep lessons about the value of patience.
Sook and Buddy’s connection is strengthened by their annual ritual which includes gathering in an old baby buggy the nuts from an ancient pecan grove, painstakingly shelling them by a fire, patiently squirreling away their pennies for a year so they can buy other necessary ingredients (including homemade whiskey), baking thirty-one cakes in four days, and sending them off to “friends, not necessarily neighbor friends, indeed the larger share are intended for persons we’ve met maybe once, perhaps not all… People who have struck our fancy.” Once the cakes are on their way, there are their other holiday customs to attend to – cutting a tree from deep in the forest, handcrafting decorations, buying their dog Queenie a bone, and making each other a gift, which usually and quite magically ends up being a kite, easily read as a symbol of the transcendence that their friendship and their caring for others bring.
One of the lines that especially caught my eye as I reread the novella this year has to do with a statement Sook makes when she and Buddy refuse a veritable fortune for the treasure of a Christmas tree they have cut. The mill owner’s wife, who very much wants their tree says, “Goodness, woman, you can get another one.” Buddy reports, “In answer, my friend gently reflects: ‘I doubt it. There’s never two of anything.’” That’s probably true of the most valuable things in life, yet it also strikes me that yearly rituals such as those engaged in by Sook and Buddy can indeed multiply and deepen life’s most valued relationships, moments, and expressions of compassion.
The same is true of each family’s holiday rituals. When we’re patient and take the time to get beyond the rush, hype, and the material, there’s that which can bring greater continuity to our lives, can deepen our love, can focus us on what is truly important, and can bind us more closely together. That’s what I hope you and your family will find this and every year, if you celebrate a year-end holiday or not.