A Child's Christmas in Wales
Dylan Thomas, a pudgy gnomelike figure with the voice of a god, was a very powerful writer, & an even more powerful speaker, as the extant recordings of his works attest. What follows is his delightful short story overflowing with wonderful wordplay called A Child's Christmas in Wales: "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 & six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days & twelve nights when I was six. All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold & headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, & I plunge my hands in the snow & 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, & out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen. It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, & 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 & callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek & long as jaguars & horrible-whiskered, spitting & snarling, they would slink & sidle over the white back-garden walls, & the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim & I, fur-capped & moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes. The wise cats never appeared..."