What do you think?
Rate this book
48 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1952
Years and years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the colour 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 parlours . . .Dylan Thomas was a Welsh poet who lived a short, intense life (he died of his excesses when he was only 39). He disliked being regarded as a "Welsh" writer and had no use for Welsh nationalism. And yet he came up with this beautiful, lyrical tribute to his childhood Christmases in the coastal town of Swansea, Wales, in the early 1900's, "before the motor-car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and snowed."
And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?”
A CHILD'S CHRISTMAS IN WALES = snow~snow~snow....Lots of snow filled memories of family, friends and neighbors....a creepy caroling outing....and mischief by the sea as remembered by a youngster. "Can the fishes see it snowing?"
So enjoy the classics. This work by Dylan Thomas published in 1952.
It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero's garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes. The wise cats never appeared.