A Child's Christmas in Wales
sooths, comforts, and readies us for the pleasures of the season. It's
a gift for the senses. We feel the snow as "it came shawling out of the
ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the
trees;" and hear the music of the season, as "an uncle played fiddle, a
cousin sang 'Cherry Ripe,' and another uncle sang 'Drake's Drum.'" We
touch the gifts, both "useful," "eugulfing mufflers of the old coach
days, and mittens made for giant sloths," and "useless," "bags of moist
and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a
tram-conductor's cap." Taste buds awaken as Thomas describes the
"turkey and blazing pudding." Smells, too, waft through the book's
short length, "the bird smell, the brandy, the pudding and mince,
coiling up to my nostrils." As Dylan Thomas recalls his childhood
Christmases, we remember our own and, as we do, the book moves beyond
Wales and into every heart that enjoys warm memories of the season.
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years
around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant
speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I
can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I
was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when
I was six. -- from A Child's Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas
Related Websites
BBC -- Dylan Thomas
The County and City of Swansea
