A Child's Christmas in Wales

I did not know what to expect when I bought this book. I didn't know anything about it or about the author, but I love England and Wales and that's what attracted me to it. It is a book of childhood memories of the author growing up in Wales. It is simple, humorous, but not as insightful to the Christmas traditions in Wales as I had initially thought.

I had read excerpts of A Child's Christmas in Wales and loved what I had read, but it wasn't until I heard the entire tale in Dylan's voice on NPR that I completely fell in love with it. Dylan's voice is warm, deep, slightly wry, and rolling. If you haven't read it or heard it, it's a retelling of a Christmas past to a child. And it has the same questions and interruptions as you would expect from a small listener and has the same weight of an exaggerated epic that you might expect from a favorite uncle or father telling one of their "days of yore" stories. I've been told that Dylan's largest fan base is in the U.S., and A Child's Christmas in Wales has the same charming humor and nostalgia that Rockwell's paintings and Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days capture. An idealized notion of American middle class values, but a hint of self-mocking that keeps it grounded. I think he perfectly captures the expectations of Christmas and the feel of large family gatherings. A favorite bit in which he describes the Uncles who sit in the parlors and breath like dolphins and the pale little aunts that seem to accumulate at family holidays: "Some few large men sat in the front parlors, without their collars, Uncles almost certainly, trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms' length, returning them to their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as though waiting for the explosion; and some few small aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edge of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers." Every time I read or hear it I get some deep-rooted domestic compulsion and feel the need run out and buy eggnog, knit something (nevermind the fact that I don't know how to), or find a rocking chair to sit on in front of a fire.

Dylan Thomas' imagery and prose invoke the secular feelings of Christmas like no other book. His floating word-pictures are both vague and precise, inviting the reader's imagination to fill in the blanks. Thomas creates the sensations of memory--blurred, idiosyncratic, and suffused with impression:"There were church bells, too""Inside them?""No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries, tugged by bishops and storks. And they rang their tidings over the bandaged town, over the frozen foam of the powder and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea."Fortunately, the dreamlike imagery never weighs down the book. Instead, Thomas wishes only to convey the warmth, humor, and imagination of his childhood Christmases in Wales. Although this is great modernist literature, it is completely unpretentious and can be enjoyed by all ages. The book seems longer than it is, perhaps because Thomas' depictions linger warmly after one reads about the Christmas fire, the smoking Uncles and drinking aunts, the presents ("...and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow"), the dinner, the caroling at the large strange house where "the wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men in caves," the music, and the soft bedtime.These episodes are generally no longer than a page each, but they graft onto our own memories--or would-be memories--of what Christmas could or should be like. In sum, it's a pleasure for the both the intellect and the senses, an unsentimental yet warm treat for both young and older audiences. It's one of the truest--and therefore most satisfying--Christmas books you'll ever read.

The poetry background of Dylan Thomas gives these reminiscences a certain lyrical quality: Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea." "But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards."And they are wonderfully evocative of his Welsh youth.But for me they also evoked another memory, of a trip that Bud Rouse and I made up to Saratoga. We visited friends of his who worked at the track and had a horse of their own (Double Russian was the name, if memory serves). We had fun at the races, hanging on the far side with all the Hispanic groomsmen and walkers and cussing out prima donna jockeys. And after dinner and a few frosties that night, our host took down a collection of Dylan Thomas poems and we took turns reading them aloud. It was precisely the kind of affected scene that you'd expect in a Manhattan novel or like something out of a gutter version of Jane Austen, but I'll be damned if we didn't have fun.The best, most treasured, books and writers of our lives become entwined in our existence in just such odd and unique ways. Then any time we encounter them again, they trigger a cascade of memories. For no reason that will ever matter to anyone else, Dylan Thomas is such a writer for me. But I think everyone will enjoy this short but terrific memoir.GRADE: A

Why, oh why, do we insist on reciting "Twas the Night," perhaps "A Christmas Carol," every holiday season when this, probably the most intelligent, endearing, and entertaining holiday fable ever written, goes unnoticed? Do yourself a favor, buy this book and fall in love with it as I did! Then buy another copy for someone else!

Scaring sleeping uncles by popping balloons. Getting a hatchet by mistake. Snowballing cats. Dylan Thomas has captured the perfect Christmas. Without any moral, very little plot, and a concern only for the child's perspective, this little piece sticks in my mind better than any other Christmas story I've ever read. Between drunk Auntie Hannah singing in the backyard and the haunted house down the streets where a group of mischievous carollers get the living hell scared out of them, "A Child's Christmas in Wales" is everything Christmas should be: funny, happy, poignant, a little sad, and fattening. Keep a bowl of candy nearby when you read it.