Course:A Child's Christmas in Wales
A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, a slim and crumbling paperback with woodcuts by Ellen Raskin, was part of the small library of Christmas books my mother pulled out every December. It tells the story of an idealized Christmas, or many accumulated Christmases (snow on snow), in a series of nostalgic vignettes, interspersed with dialogue between the speaker and a young listener. I found the story as a child, by the fireplace of my childhood home in Calgary, and was so intoxicated by the richness of the language that I made a tradition of reading it aloud to anyone who would sit still long enough. It is a piece which innocently insists on being read aloud:
One Christmas was so much like the other, in those years around the sea-town corner now, 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.
Later, I heard the famous recording of Thomas himself, his Welsh voice deep and mellifluous, hissing and crackling the consonants, singing the vowels, so that assonance and consonance were, as they should be, simply music:
…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 whitewash 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 thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards."
I am a singer and always have been. As a child I would sing everywhere, morning until night, to anyone and everyone. Music is my pulse, my first language, but I have, at times, struggled to allow musicality into my written work and just let it sing. Maybe because I was once told by an older male writer I admired that my writing was too flowery. Of course I wilted and dried up. (But I love flowers! Oh, to write like flowers! Music and flowers have a lot in common.) As I grew up on the page I began to suppress my joyful, erupting, musical-floral impulses because I learned that good writing should be spare, restrained, clipped, efficient.
In his time Dylan Thomas was called florid, accused of excess and breathlessness. Certainly there are passages of Under Milk Wood that leave performers gasping for air. But I am drawn to writers, like Thomas, whose work is lush and abundant, unfettered, resounding and expansive. I've come to realize that these qualities are not exclusive of clarity, specificity and maturity.
The Christmas when my son was born it snowed and it snowed. It snowed so much that my doctor couldn't make it to the hospital to assist with my labour. I remember I could feel the bright quiet of it, even through the closed hospital window. I had been unexpectedly induced and, during early labour, while my husband and sister slept uncomfortably nearby and I lay constricted by a fetal heart monitor - trying to sleep, trying to ignore the contractions, trying not to look for decelerations in my baby's heartbeat - I listened to A Child's Christmas in Wales. I thought about our child, how this would be their first Christmas. I thought about the Christmases of my childhood. One Christmas was so much like the other... The rhythm and music of the language calmed me, gave me strength and brought me back to myself: my body and my breath and my two heartbeats. My expansive interiority. (I mean that the bells that the children could hear were inside them.) I played the story over and over (snow on snow) like a prayer.
It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.
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