A Christmas Memory is a heartwarming short story by Truman Capote, first published in 1956. This autobiographical recollection of Capote's rural Alabama boyhood has become a modern-day classic.

Seven-year-old Buddy knows that the Christmas season has arrived when his cousin, Miss Sook Falk, exclaims: "It's fruitcake weather!" Thus begins an unforgettable portrait of an odd but enduring friendship between two innocent souls—one young and one old—and the memories they share of beloved holiday rituals.

This reminiscence of a Christmas shared by a seven-year-old boy and a sixtyish childlike woman is filled with enormous love and friendship, capturing the essence of holiday spirit and nostalgia.

Merry Christmas! ...every idiot who goes about with "Merry Christmas" on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding.

Dickens' story of solitary miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who is taught the true meaning of Christmas by a series of ghostly visitors, has proved one of his most well-loved works. Since its publication in 1843, it has had an enduring influence on the way we think about the traditions of Christmas.

Dickens' other Christmas writings collected here include:

• The Story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton, the short story from The Pickwick Papers on which A Christmas Carol was based;
• The Haunted Man, a tale of a man tormented by painful memories;
• along with shorter pieces, some drawn from the 'Christmas Stories' that Dickens wrote annually for his weekly journals.

In all of them, Dickens celebrates the season as one of geniality, charity, and remembrance.

Set in the Ardennes Forest on Christmas Eve 1944, Sergeant Will Knott and five other GIs are ordered close to the German lines to establish an observation post in an abandoned chateau. Here, they play at being soldiers in what seems to be complete isolation.

That is, until the Germans begin revealing their whereabouts and leaving signs of their presence: a scarecrow, equipment the squad had dropped on a retreat from a reconnaissance mission and, strangest of all, a small fir tree hung with fruit, candles, and cardboard stars.

Suddenly, Knott and the others must unravel these mysteries, learning as they do about themselves, about one another, and about the "enemy," until A Midnight Clear reaches its unexpected climax, one of the most shattering in the literature of war.