A Child's Christmas in Wales

Rating:
Summary: Recapturing the past we never knew
Review: Christmas so often disappoints us. And why not? How could it ever live up to the sappy and maudlin presentations it suffers so often on TV, in the movies, even in commercials! Along comes Dylan Thomas (well he came along a while ago) and captures elements of the holiday that we can still live today. There is a town shut up against the cold with the occasional hardy soul braving the elements. There are families, rich in generations, sharing a day punctuated more by the telling of tales than the exchange of gifts. There are children overcoming their own fears of the unknown to give "Good King Wenceslaus" to a spectral figure behind a closed door. And there lies, on the final page and in the final line, an ending that captures all of what is best in the holiday and, maybe, what is best in all of us. Granted, until you hear the poet himself read this work, you will never capture the full effect, but you will come close. And you may be more ready for Christmas than you have ever been before.

Rating:
Summary: Enchanting Poetic Dylan Thomas Classic
Review: Dylan Thomas' 'A Child's Christmas in Wales' in it's second print for generations has become an enchanting, simple poetic tale captured in the eyes of a child. The language is delightfully entrancing and the poetry shines with a heavenly radiance. Thomas' style captures an adult's warm memory of a holiday-season that reflects presents, good things to eat, and when it was just right, white blanket of new snow with all it's wonder and the mischief of snowball battles and any exaggeration that moves that will spark the imagination of a child.

This second edition of Thomas' magical tale is lavishly illustration with old-fashioned, scratchboard-like engravings by Fritz Eichenberg. Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales in 1914. He began writing poetry at a very young age and published his first book, '18 Poems' at twenty. From 1943 until his death he broadcasted his own radio talk program on BBC. He read poetry selections, participated in table discussions, and read dramas and essays. His voice became familiar with Americans in the 1950s during his lecture tours at American universities. He had achieved an admirable audience for his poetry. Besides this book and his poetry his other most widely read works are 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog,' 'Quite Early One Morning' and his play, 'Under Milk Wood.'

'A Child's Christmas in Wales' is Thomas' most fine work of art-with it's human quality, touching sentiment, easily understood presentation and child-like wisdom that gives Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol' a second glance at holiday tradition. After all we can all find a child in Christmas in all of us.

Rating:
Summary: A Simple Treasure; A Singular Triumph
Review: Dylan Thomas' imagery and prose invoke the secular feelings of Christmas like no other book. His floating word-pictures are both vague and precise, inviting the reader's imagination to fill in the blanks. Thomas creates the sensations of memory--blurred, idiosyncratic, and suffused with impression:

"There were church bells, too"
"Inside them?"
"No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries, tugged by bishops and storks. And they rang their tidings over the bandaged town, over the frozen foam of the powder and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea."

Fortunately, the dreamlike imagery never weighs down the book. Instead, Thomas wishes only to convey the warmth, humor, and imagination of his childhood Christmases in Wales. Although this is great modernist literature, it is completely unpretentious and can be enjoyed by all ages. The book seems longer than it is, perhaps because Thomas' depictions linger warmly after one reads about the Christmas fire, the smoking Uncles and drinking aunts, the presents ("...and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow"), the dinner, the caroling at the large strange house where "the wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men in caves," the music, and the soft bedtime.

These episodes are generally no longer than a page each, but they graft onto our own memories--or would-be memories--of what Christmas could or should be like. In sum, it's a pleasure for the both the intellect and the senses, an unsentimental yet warm treat for both young and older audiences. It's one of the truest--and therefore most satisfying--Christmas books you'll ever read.

Rating:
Summary: Gorgeous voice
Review: I had read excerpts of A Child's Christmas in Wales and loved what I had read, but it wasn't until I heard the entire tale in Dylan's voice on NPR that I completely fell in love with it. Dylan's voice is warm, deep, slightly wry, and rolling.

If you haven't read it or heard it, it's a retelling of a Christmas past to a child. And it has the same questions and interruptions as you would expect from a small listener and has the same weight of an exaggerated epic that you might expect from a favorite uncle or father telling one of their "days of yore" stories.

I've been told that Dylan's largest fan base is in the U.S., and A Child's Christmas in Wales has the same charming humor and nostalgia that Rockwell's paintings and Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days capture. An idealized notion of American middle class values, but a hint of self-mocking that keeps it grounded. I think he perfectly captures the expectations of Christmas and the feel of large family gatherings. A favorite bit in which he describes the Uncles who sit in the parlors and breath like dolphins and the pale little aunts that seem to accumulate at family holidays:

"Some few large men sat in the front parlors, without their collars, Uncles almost certainly, trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms' length, returning them to their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as though waiting for the explosion; and some few small aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edge of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers."

Every time I read or hear it I get some deep-rooted domestic compulsion and feel the need run out and buy eggnog, knit something (nevermind the fact that I don't know how to), or find a rocking chair to sit on in front of a fire.

Rating:
Summary: The Best Christmas Book EVER.
Review: I really cannot say enough wonderful things about this book and the audio tape of Dylan Thomas reading it. My Christmas seasons have been enriched beyond measure since a loved one gave me this book. It is the most evocative and beautiful Christmas tale I've ever read and reading it aloud on Christmas Eve has become a beloved tradition in our family. It even inspired my husband and me to spend Christmas 2 years ago in the Cotswolds (England, not Wales... I realize), but we yearned for a more traditional "old world" holiday season and found it in the countryside not far from Wales. If you love the spirit of Christmas, this book is truly essential....such beautiful words with amazing soul, you will be enchanted.

Rating:
Summary: Essential
Review: Just finished with the annual tradition of reading this fine work aloud to the whole household, & although Dylan Thomas's perfect (if sometimes tongue-twisting) prose cannot be improved upon, nonetheless, Trina Schart Hyman's illustrations do enhance the story, & make the Welsh poet's vivid reminiscences even vivider. A marvel of beauty, both lyrical (Thomas) and visual (Hyman); a joy to peruse. Make this edition of "A Child's Christmas in Wales" part of your collection, and part of your Yuletide tradition!

Rating:
Summary: More than a Christmas story.
Review: Scaring sleeping uncles by popping balloons. Getting a hatchet by mistake. Snowballing cats. Dylan Thomas has captured the perfect Christmas. Without any moral, very little plot, and a concern only for the child's perspective, this little piece sticks in my mind better than any other Christmas story I've ever read. Between drunk Auntie Hannah singing in the backyard and the haunted house down the streets where a group of mischievous carollers get the living hell scared out of them, "A Child's Christmas in Wales" is everything Christmas should be: funny, happy, poignant, a little sad, and fattening. Keep a bowl of candy nearby when you read it.

Rating:
Summary: An old tradition
Review: The poetry background of Dylan Thomas gives these reminiscences a certain lyrical quality:

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color 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 parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when 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."

"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from white wash 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 thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards."

And they are wonderfully evocative of his Welsh youth.

But for me they also evoked another memory, of a trip that Bud Rouse and I made up to Saratoga. We visited friends of his who worked at the track and had a horse of their own (Double Russian was the name, if memory serves). We had fun at the races, hanging on the far side with all the Hispanic groomsmen and walkers and cussing out prima donna jockeys. And after dinner and a few frosties that night, our host took down a collection of Dylan Thomas poems and we took turns reading them aloud. It was precisely the kind of affected scene that you'd expect in a Manhattan novel or like something out of a gutter version of Jane Austen, but I'll be damned if we didn't have fun.

The best, most treasured, books and writers of our lives become entwined in our existence in just such odd and unique ways. Then any time we encounter them again, they trigger a cascade of memories. For no reason that will ever matter to anyone else, Dylan Thomas is such a writer for me. But I think everyone will enjoy this short but terrific memoir.

GRADE: A

Rating:
Summary: Eloquent, poetic words; gorgeous pictures, but...
Review: This is as nice an edition of Dylan Thomas' "A Child's Christmas in Wales" as it is possible to imagine. It is beautifully laid out, in a wide children's picture-book format, with colorful and evocative paintings by illustrator Christopher Raschka.

If you've never encountered Dylan Thomas' vision of his childhood Christmas in Wales before, you're in for a real treat. Boys chase each other through the snow; uncles repair to the drawing room lighting pipes; aunts offer Useless Presents such as mufflers long enough to swing from, and my favorite - the Prothero family's house starts to go on fire, which the gaggle of boys attempts to extinguish with snowballs.

It's clear that a poet wrote this; every word counts not just in the mental images it provokes but also in its glorious SOUND - please try reading it out loud; it is positively musical.

But - I confess the current edition seems mismarketed to me. It's not really a children's book, although older children, at least, may enjoy having it read to them. The picture-book format (and the above product info's insistence that the reading level is "4 to 8 years") might make you, the reader, think of it as a good Christmas present for the pre-school set. But the language is dense and unfamiliar to little ones (the uncles smokes 'briars' not pipes), and the text is longer than a little kid will sit still for (my 5-year-old for example).

I read it to my very attentive 10-year-old as well, and even he had trouble grasping all Thomas' delicious and metaphorical language.

So buy it; read it out loud to yourself in front of an evening fireplace, and Merry Christmas to you all.

Rating:
Summary: Best of all having it read aloud to oneself
Review: Who hasn't read this short tale of magic about Christmas past in a village in Wales, Dylan Thomas' most beloved book? I've read it to myself perhaps 20 times; I've read it to my children and laughed over the pictures maybe 10 more times. But, till now, I've never experienced the joy of hearing the poet himself read it to me. Omigod, what a pure pleasure. Recorded in 1952, this new release is all cleaned up and is a real keeper. Thomas' cadences, inflections, emphasis, pauses, and his marvelous Welsh accent make a listener close her eyes and just get lost in the humor and love and reminiscences of a bygone era.
There are quite a few other selections in this collection - and they're good - but even if you buy it just for A Child's Christmas in Wales, it'll be money well spent.