A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas

 

Each year I bring out this dear little book with all the other Christmas books. I don't think I have ever read it in its entirety until now. Most people seem to catagorize it as "prose poetry". Whatever it is called, I loved it so much, and I find myself admiring the film version even more because it is very true to Thomas' words. I've written about the movie here, if you would like to read it.

I had forgotten that I gave it to my mother.

It clutches at my heart and makes me cry - the way she wrote "my Nan". She died three years later.

Two years earlier, Tom had given her this album on the first Christmas after my father died.

I heard her play "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" a lot, and I think it was a comfort to her. There's a line "Though Lovers Be Lost, Love Shall Not". Deep fellow that Mr. Thomas.

And that depth comes through in "A Child's Christmas in Wales". His words convey so much feeling. He writes of "the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep". Do we all hear those voices?  Of our long-dead parents or grandparents? And we never can remember because we fall into sleep right afterward? 

The heartfelt parts are balanced by the humorous remembrances like Miss Protheroe asking firemen who have been fighting a fire in the house, "Would you like anything to read?"

Thomas offers litanies of "useful presents" - "engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens made for giant sloths" and "useless presents" - "bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies" and "a tram-conductor's cap and machine that punched tickets". "And a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the street and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it."

After an adventure outdoors with friends, they "returned home through the poor streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheel-rutted snow and cat-called after us..."

If you type his name into the blog's search, you will find more by Dylan Thomas, including the words that end both this book and the movie;

"Looking through my bedroom window, out into

the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow,

I could see the lights in the windows

of all the other houses on our hill and hear

the music rising from them up the long, steadily

falling night. I turned the gas down, I got 

into bed. I said some words to the close and

holy darkness, and then I slept."