Day 11: Tuesday

My most favorite Christmas poem is Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. It’s more of a prose poem, and it relates Thomas’s memories of Christmases in Wales when he was very young. The piece includes descriptions of presents, desserts, meals, relatives, and the snowy, dreamy landscape of Thomas’s youth. It’s punctuated by Christmas adventures (cats walking on walls, the day the firefighters had to come on Christmas, and the sad discovery of a small dead robin, “all but one of its fires out”), and it swirls with beautiful, funny, nostalgic, lyrical language—and is interrupted by voices of children listening to him tell his stories (“Tell us about the presents”). Dylan Thomas was recorded reading it in the 1950s, and my family had a record of the reading. It came with a little booklet of the printed piece, which was illustrated with woodcuts. We played the reading every year at Christmas.

It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, although 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 slide 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. - Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales

Listen to the full recording by Thomas: