"A Christmas Memory" is a short story by Truman Capote. Originally published in Mademoiselle magazine in December 1956, it was reprinted in The Selected Writings of Truman Capote in 1963. It was issued in a stand-alone hardcover edition by Random House in 1966, and it has been published in many editions and anthologies since.

The largely autobiographical story, which is set in the early 1930s, describes a period in the lives of the seven-year-old narrator and an elderly woman who is his distant cousin and best friend. The woman was Nanny Faulk, elder sister of the household where Capote's wayward parents deposited him as a young boy. Nanny, whom everyone called Sook, was thought to be developmentally disabled. But Capote later wrote a friend, "I had an elderly cousin, the woman in my story 'A Christmas Memory,' who was a genius."

The evocative narrative focuses on country life, friendship, and the joy of giving during the Christmas season, and it also gently yet poignantly touches on loneliness and loss.

Now a holiday classic, "A Christmas Memory" has been broadcast, recorded, filmed, and staged multiple times, in award-winning productions.

Narrated by an unnamed, seven-year-old boy who is addressed as "Buddy" by his older cousin, "A Christmas Memory" is about the narrator's relationship with his older, unnamed, female cousin, to whom he refers throughout the story only as "my friend." (In later adaptations, she is called Sook.) Buddy and his cousin, who is eccentric and childlike, live in a house with other relatives—who are authoritarian and stern—and have a dog named Queenie.

The family is very poor, but Buddy looks forward to Christmas every year nevertheless, and he and his elderly cousin save their pennies for this occasion. Each year at Christmastime, Buddy and his friend collect pecans and buy other ingredients to make fruitcakes; although set during Prohibition, these include whiskey, which they buy from a scary—but ultimately friendly—Indian bootlegger named Haha Jones. They send the cakes to acquaintances they have met only once or twice, and to people they've never met at all, such as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

This year, after the two have finished the elaborate four-day production of making fruitcakes, the elderly cousin decides to celebrate by finishing off the remaining whiskey. This leads to Buddy and his cousin becoming giddy drunk, and the cousin being severely reprimanded by angry relatives for letting Buddy imbibe. She runs off to her room crying, but Buddy follows and comforts her with thoughts of Christmas rituals.

The next day, Buddy and his friend go to a faraway grove, which the elderly cousin has proclaimed the best place, by far, to chop down Christmas trees. They manage to chop and carry home a large and beautiful tree, despite the arduousness of the trek. They spend the following days making decorations for the tree and presents for the relatives, Queenie, and each other. Buddy and the older cousin keep their gifts to each other a secret, and although Buddy knows his friend desperately wishes she could afford to get him a bike, he assumes his friend has made him a kite, as she has every year. He has made her a kite, too.