A Child’s Christmas in Wales

[bridget orman]

A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas
This is a delightful lyrical tale by Dylan Thomas about cats and uncles and memories of his past Christmas as a boy in Wales. “It was 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 heart-shaped hills.” In Thomas’s memory the postmen had “sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully”.
It is a wonderfully evocative piece of writing with its ability to conjure up a more innocent world where “snow came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and bodies of the trees”.
Listen to Dylan Thomas reading his work here.
It is a joy to listen to his resonant tones recorded in 1952 at Steinway Hall, New York. If Christmas as a season reminds us all of the wonder of children and makes us hark back with nostalgia to our own childhoods, this is the poem that embodies all those feelings for me. I’d especially like to invite Auntie Hannah “who liked port and stood in the middle of the snowbound back yard, singing like a big-bosomed thrush” to Christmas dinner.
Thomas’s work has been adapted for stage and screen and there are some beautifully illustrated children’s books that help sprinkle the magic of his prose onto a new generation of readers.

[Lady Boru]

Thank you