Child's Christmas in Wales

by Dylan Thomas


One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the 
sea-town corner now and 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. 




All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold 
and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they 
stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my 
hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand 
into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of 
the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen. 
It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. 
Prothero's garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. 
It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as 
Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, 
cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the 
cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and 
snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, 
and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers 
from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at 
the green of their eyes. The wise cats never appeared. 
We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence 
of the eternal snows - eternal, ever since Wednesday - that we never 
heard Mrs. Prothero's first cry from her igloo at the bottom of the 
garden. Or, if we heard it at all, it was, to us, like the far-off 
challenge of our enemy and prey, the neighbor's polar cat. But soon the 
voice grew louder. 
"Fire!" cried Mrs. Prothero, and she beat the dinner-gong.
And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, toward the 
house; and smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dining-room, and the 
gong was bombilating, and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruin like a town 
crier in Pompeii. This was better than all the cats in Wales standing on 
the wall in a row. We bounded into the house, laden with snowballs, and 
stopped at the open door of the smoke-filled room.
Something was burning all right; perhaps it was Mr. Prothero, who always 
slept there after midday dinner with a newspaper over his face. But he 
was standing in the middle of the room, saying, "A fine Christmas!" and 
smacking at the smoke with a slipper. 
"Call the fire brigade," cried Mrs. Prothero as she beat the gong. 
"There won't be there," said Mr. Prothero, "it's Christmas." 
There was no fire to be seen, only clouds of smoke and Mr. Prothero 
standing in the middle of them, waving his slipper as though he were 
conducting. 
"Do something," he said. And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke - 
I think we missed Mr. Prothero - and ran out of the house to the 
telephone box. 
"Let's call the police as well," Jim said. "And the ambulance." "And 
Ernie Jenkins, he likes fires." 
But we only called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and 
three tall men in helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr. Prothero 
got out just in time before they turned it on. Nobody could have had a 
noisier Christmas Eve. And when the firemen turned off the hose and were 
standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came 
downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to 
hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She 
looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing 
among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, 
"Would you like anything to read?" 
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." 
"Were there postmen then, too?" 
"With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet 
they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully. But all 
that the children could hear was a ringing of bells."
"You mean that the postman went rat-a-tat-tat and the doors rang?"
"I mean that the bells the children could hear were inside them." 
"I only hear thunder sometimes, never bells." 
"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. 
It seemed that all the churches boomed for joy under my window; and the 
weathercocks crew for Christmas, on our fence."
"Get back to the postmen"
"They were just ordinary postmen, found of walking and dogs and 
Christmas and the snow. They knocked on the doors with blue knuckles 
...." 
"Ours has got a black knocker...." 
"And then they stood on the white Welcome mat in the little, drifted 
porches and huffed and puffed, making ghosts with their breath, and 
jogged from foot to foot like small boys wanting to go out." 
"And then the presents?" 
"And then the Presents, after the Christmas box. And the cold postman, 
with a rose on his button-nose, tingled down the tea-tray-slithered run 
of the chilly glinting hill. He went in his ice-bound boots like a man 
on fishmonger's slabs. 
"He wagged his bag like a frozen camel's hump, dizzily turned the corner 
on one foot, and, by God, he was gone." 
"Get back to the Presents." 
"There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach 
days, and mittens made for giant sloths; zebra scarfs of a substance 
like silky gum that could be tug-o'-warred down to the galoshes; 
blinding tam-o'-shanters like patchwork tea cozies and bunny-suited 
busbies and balaclavas for victims of head-shrinking tribes; from aunts 
who always wore wool next to the skin there were mustached and rasping 
vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all; and 
once I had a little crocheted nose bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer 
whinnying with us. And pictureless books in which small boys, though 
warned with quotations not to, would skate on Farmer Giles' pond and did 
and drowned; and books that told me everything about the wasp, except w
hy." 




"Go on the Useless Presents." 
"Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a 
false nose and a tram-conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets 
and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by mistake that no one could 
explain, a little hatchet; 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; and a painting book in which I could 
make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any colour I pleased, 
and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under 
the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds. Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and 
allsorts, crunches, cracknels, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and 
butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if 
they could not fight, could always run. And Snakes-and-Families and 
Happy Ladders. And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with 
instructions. Oh, easy for Leonardo! And a whistle to make the dogs bark 
to wake up the old man next door to make him beat on the wall with his 
stick to shake our picture off the wall. And a packet of cigarettes: you 
put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the street and you 
waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a 
cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it. And then it was breakfast 
under the balloons." 
"Were there Uncles like in our house?" 
"There are always Uncles at Christmas. The same Uncles. And on Christmas 
morning, with dog-disturbing whistle and sugar fags, I would scour the 
swatched town for the news of the little world, and find always a dead 
bird by the Post Office or by the white deserted swings; perhaps a 
robin, all but one of his fires out. Men and women wading or scooping 
back from chapel, with taproom noses and wind-bussed cheeks, all 
albinos, huddles their stiff black jarring feathers against the 
irreligious snow. Mistletoe hung from the gas brackets in all the front 
parlors; there was sherry and walnuts and bottled beer and crackers by 
the dessertspoons; and cats in their fur-abouts watched the fires; and 
the high-heaped fire spat, all ready for the chestnuts and the mulling 
pokers. 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." 




Not many those mornings trod the piling streets: an old man always, 
fawn-bowlered, yellow-gloved and, at this time of year, with spats of 
snow, would take his constitutional to the white bowling green and back, 
as he would take it wet or fire on Christmas Day or Doomsday; sometimes 
two hale young men, with big pipes blazing, no overcoats and wind blown 
scarfs, would trudge, unspeaking, down to the forlorn sea, to work up an 
appetite, to blow away the fumes, who knows, to walk into the waves 
until nothing of them was left but the two furling smoke clouds of their 
inextinguishable briars. Then I would be slap-dashing home, the gravy 
smell of the dinners of others, the bird smell, the brandy, the pudding 
and mince, coiling up to my nostrils, when out of a snow-clogged side 
lane would come a boy the spit of myself, with a pink-tipped cigarette 
and the violet past of a black eye, cocky as a bullfinch, leering all to 
himself. 




I hated him on sight and sound, and would be about to put my dog whistle 
to my lips and blow him off the face of Christmas when suddenly he, with 
a violet wink, put his whistle to his lips and blew so stridently, so 
high, so exquisitely loud, that gobbling faces, their cheeks bulged with 
goose, would press against their tinsled windows, the whole length of 
the white echoing street. 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, 
bearing tureens. Auntie Bessie, who had already been frightened, twice, 
by a clock-work mouse, whimpered at the sideboard and had some 
elderberry wine. The dog was sick. Auntie Dosie had to have three 
aspirins, but Auntie Hannah, who liked port, stood in the middle of the 
snowbound back yard, singing like a big-bosomed thrush. I would blow up 
balloons to see how big they would blow up to; and, when they burst, 
which they all did, the Uncles jumped and rumbled. In the rich and heavy 
afternoon, the Uncles breathing like dolphins and the snow descending, I 
would sit among festoons and Chinese lanterns and nibble dates and try 
to make a model man-o'-war, following the Instructions for Little 
Engineers, and produce what might be mistaken for a sea-going tramcar. 




Or I would go out, my bright new boots squeaking, into the white world, 
on to the seaward hill, to call on Jim and Dan and Jack and to pad 
through the still streets, leaving huge footprints on the hidden 
pavements. 
"I bet people will think there's been hippos." 
"What would you do if you saw a hippo coming down our street?" 
"I'd go like this, bang! I'd throw him over the railings and roll him 
down the hill and then I'd tickle him under the ear and he'd wag his 
tail." 
"What would you do if you saw two hippos?" 
Iron-flanked and bellowing he-hippos clanked and battered through the 
scudding snow toward us as we passed Mr. Daniel's house. 
"Let's post Mr. Daniel a snow-ball through his letter box." 
"Let's write things in the snow." 
"Let's write, 'Mr. Daniel looks like a spaniel' all over his lawn." 
Or we walked on the white shore. "Can the fishes see it's snowing?" 
The silent one-clouded heavens drifted on to the sea. Now we were 
snow-blind travelers lost on the north hills, and vast dewlapped dogs, 
with flasks round their necks, ambled and shambled up to us, baying 
"Excelsior." We returned home through the poor streets where only a few 
children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheel-rutted snow and 
cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we trudged uphill, 
into the cries of the dock birds and the hooting of ships out in the 
whirling bay. And then, at tea the recovered Uncles would be jolly; and 
the ice cake loomed in the center of the table like a marble grave. 
Auntie Hannah laced her tea with rum, because it was only once a year. 
Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight 
bubbled like a diver. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I 
dared not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under 
the stairs and the gas meter ticked. And I remember that we went singing 
carols once, when there wasn't the shaving of a moon to light the flying 
streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large 
house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one 
of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of 
us too brave to say a word. The wind through the trees made noises as of 
old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves. We reached 
the black bulk of the house. "What shall we give them? Hark the Herald?" 
"No," Jack said, "Good King Wencelas. I'll count three." One, two three, 
and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the 
snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we 
knew. We stood close together, near the dark door. Good King Wencelas 
looked out On the Feast of Stephen ... And then a small, dry voice, like 
the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined our 
singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a 
small dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were 
outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons floated under the 
hot-water-bottle-gulping gas; everything was good again and shone over 
the town. 
"Perhaps it was a ghost," Jim said. "
Perhaps it was trolls," Dan said, who was always reading. 
"Let's go in and see if there's any jelly left," Jack said. And we did 
that. 
Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a 
cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." 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, steady 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.