December 24, 2012

Dylan Thomas: A Child's Christmas in Wales

Written by my friend Marsha.

It took years and many rereadings of Dylan Thomas' A Child's Christmas in Wales to really get it. I'd always enjoyed the work, but as with so many thing, didn't know what I didn't know until my annual reread some three or four years after I became a parent. Perhaps it is easier for others to see the warp and weft of the tapestry that binds us together through generations and which Thomas evokes so easily - for me, I needed the combination of the book in my hands and a preschooler on my lap.

The text, which can be read in one sitting if one is lucky, is straightforward. Thomas recalls to a young friend a romanticized, idyllic version of his childhood Christmas celebrations. There are boyhood shenanigans, cooking fires, fussing aunts and drowsy uncles. He tells of gifts designed for "young engineers" (worried about STEM education even, then?) and outsized personalities in his town. It's clear that so much of what he relays never really happened quite the way described, for that is the way of adult memories attempting to call back youthful events, even so we identify thoroughly with those memories. I have, as you may have, wrestled with bustling relatives in my home's kitchen. I have overheard family drama spilling over, drama that I identified as such even if I didn't understand what it meant. I have perpetrated sneaky pranks on cousins visiting for the day. And so did Dylan Thomas. My Christmas may differ from his in so many ways but these things are the essence of holiday memory. Most of us experience them, whether in Wales or the U.S. or elsewhere, whether snow arrives or doesn't, whether gifts baffle or hit the mark precisely. These are the things we remember. Even as Christmas now is so different than Christmas then, it is really -in every way that matters - just the same.

There is a telling of a creation story that begins "Now I don't know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true." That is precisely the point of rereading A Child's Christmas in Wales year after year. And now that I am a parent, it is the point of sharing my children memories of the Sears Wishbook and the feet and feet of snow that fell every year (just in time for Christmas and which required no messy clean-up) and the hot orange tea my mother made better than anyone else's mother, anywhere. None of those memories may be accurate, but they are all true. So it is with Dylan Thomas.