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It’s the traditions that make Christmas — an otherwise downright Scrooge and noninclusive holiday — meaningful: trimming the tree, singing carols, hanging the lights, anything that gets people together for, in the words of Clark Griswold, “a fun old fashion family Christmas.” And one of the best public Christmas traditions in Miami happens this Monday.
For the last ten years, beloved Ransom Everglades teacher Dan Bowden, 80, has read Truman Capote’s classic short story “A Christmas Memory” at Books and Books in the Gables, though he started reading the story to his students around the time it originally appeared in Mademoiselle magazine in 1956. Bowden’s charming Southern accent is a perfect match for Capote’s own writing style, heavily influenced by the author’s upbringing in rural Alabama. If you have any jaded feelings about the holiday season (see above), one sentence from Bowden and Capote will take you right back to your own childhood memories.
Mon., Dec. 14, 8 p.m., 2009
