A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas

On December 17^th of 1843, Charles Dickens published his iconic holiday tale, A Christmas Carol.  Everyone is familiar with the details and characters: Scrooge, Marley, Tiny Tim, and the visits of the three ghosts, Christmases Past, Present, and “Yet to Come.”  The initial printing of 6,000 copies sold out in a few days and has been popular ever since.  Dickens received credit for helping revive interest in old Christmas customs, including Christmas trees and the recently introduced Christmas cards.  However, another tale hovers around the edges of Christmas reading – “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by Dylan Thomas.  This prose work, originally written for radio, was recorded by Thomas in 1952.  It takes a nostalgic view of Christmas from an earlier, simpler time. 

Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales in 1914, and dropped out of school at 16.  He first worked as a journalist, but his poem, "Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines" in 1934, laid the foundation for his literary reputation.  Thomas and his family lived hand-to-mouth in the Welsh fishing village of Laugharne.  He found it difficult to earn a living as a writer, so he turned to radio and speaking and reading tours.  “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” became his most popular work, along with the poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.”  Thomas’ Christmas tale is warm and pleasing to the mind.  He begins the story like this,

“One Christmas was so much like another, 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” (296).

Thomas then begins his nostalgic recollections, “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, [… and while…] 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’.” (297-298).

He continues, “For dinner, we had turkey and blazing pudding, and after dinner the Uncles sat in front of the fire, loosened all buttons, put their large, moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little, and slept.  Mothers, aunts and sisters scuttled to and fro” (301).

Sure sounds like many of my childhood Christmas memories at my grandparent’s home.  Start a new tradition and read Dickens and Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” around the tree on Christmas Eve.  5 stars

--Chiron, 12/16/13

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Another book I have often read, but this time I have a clearer purpose: I am reading it to a group of senior citizens as the entertainment portion of their annual Christmas banquet.

This book embodies what Annie Dillard meant in the paragraph I quoted from The Writing Life. This is literature, and the characters come to life – each time a bit different – but more than wonderful every time. It never grows old. It always has something I want and need – it exemplifies and justifies my reasons for reading.

Maybe I need a new shelf in my library. I will call it “Evergreens.”

--Chiron, 11/25/09 (Reading aloud 12/5/09)

Great Expectations: The Graphic Novel Text adapted from Charles Dickens

My Signet Classic paperback copy of the full text of Great Expectations runs to a little over 500 pages. While I am not a great Dickens fan, I do have my favorites, and I have read this one a couple of times. So, imagine my surprise when I sat down Sunday afternoon to read the graphic version published by “Classical Comics” and finished in time to cook dinner. There is no way I could possibly read this great story in a couple hours.

Now, this may seem a benefit to some people who see reading as a waste of time. True, the illustrations have a lot of creativity, and they match, to a small degree, my idea of what the characters look like, but any serious reader will agree that the pleasure of assembling this cast of characters from the imagination is far more rewarding than adopting some other person’s ideas.

Wait, it gets better. Inside the back cover, Classical Comics is now issuing books in three formats: full text, “plain text” (wherein all the language has been modernized), and “quick text” for, as the ad says, “a fast-paced read.”

How much faster could anyone possibly want to skim through a great novel than an afternoon? What’s next, novels on Twitter? Oh, sorry, I forgot about the article I read a couple of weeks ago about “twitterature” – novels and plays reduced to 140 characters.

We are going backwards. Soon we will have novels only in pictures -- all that will be missing will be the cave wall. Graphic novels are comic books for adults without the patience or the attention span to sit down and read words. When I was a kid, I loved “Classic Comics.” I had dozens of them, but I also read many, many books. Fortunately, my curiosity about what lay “between the panels” drove me to read the texts of the stories. I doubt graphic novels will do that to today’s non-reading young people.

One star for the great drawings.

--Chiron, 7/26/09