Christmas, 1982
To Kristin –
A wonderful Christmas
story by a great poet.
Love,
Mother and Dad
Oh, to read A Child’s Christmas in Wales over the holidays during a pandemic, with three of our four parents deceased, my 91-year-old mother-in-law in lockdown in her retirement village six hours away, and time on our hands to reminisce about our childhood Christmases, when our families were healthy and intact, and all was right with the world. How many such thoughts, such essays, has Dylan Thomas’s tender story prompted over the years? Does that make my thoughts, my essay a cliché? Maybe—or maybe not, since nostalgia is “directed to one’s personal past and not the objective past,” as philosopher Paula Sweeney explains. No doubt scads of people have similar childhood memories of the holidays, yet as the narrator of A Child’s Christmas in Wales makes clear, our idiosyncratic renditions of the past possess an undeniable magic. Nevertheless, I know all about rose-colored glasses. “Although the past cannot be restored, it can be transformed in the process of remembering,” writes Julia Kindt in “On Nostalgia.” “It is popular knowledge that in hindsight things tend to look better than they were. Memory idealises the past.” Like the narrator of A Child’s Christmas in Wales, though, I see in my mind’s eye, clear as day, the beauty and enchantment of my family’s holiday traditions.
Opening Thomas’s book, I read the first sentence over and over, its lyricism and poignancy piercing my heart even while its jagged rhythm puts me off-kilter: “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.” Thus begins the narrator’s deep dive into his past: carousing with friends in the snow, getting scolded by a neighbor, nestling in the warmth and safety of his home at Christmastime. He recalls the women cooking and decorating, the uncles chatting and napping, and “some few small Aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, on the very edges of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers.” (As an aunt, I hope I never become so brittle and afraid to break, let alone unwanted.) He remembers the chilled, red-nosed postman crunching through the snow, the sound of church bells ringing, and the vast array of presents both Useful—the dreaded mufflers, mittens, and scratchy wool vests from the Aunts—and Useless: the coveted candy, tin soldiers, “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.” I love the child’s unfettered imagination.
*****
At my childhood home in South Bend, Indiana, we had no visiting aunts and uncles as my mother’s family was in Massachusetts, my father’s in Wisconsin. It was just the five of us at home: Mom and Dad, my sister, Cynthia, and my brother, Ted—and always a cat or two. The Christmas season began with the hanging of the Advent calendar from a nail on the mantel in the den on the first of December. Each morning when I came downstairs, I would run to it and open the tiny paper door for that day, feeling a quick, thrilling jolt of surprise each time—as I would forget from year to year which picture hid behind which door—followed by a reassuring sense of their familiarity. The Advent candles stood on the kitchen table in a wreath my sister had made from thick yarn, and I looked forward to the lighting of them each night at dinner.
As Christmas drew closer, our dad strung colored lights on the bare magnolia tree in our front yard and sometimes along the bushes fronting the house. Inside, we had our fragrant live tree, acquired about a week or so before Christmas. My poor dad always had a terrible time putting it up in those small, spindly metal stands in which it would lean, sway, and tip. Strategically tied string was often involved. Once the tree was up and stable, my brother and sister and I would begin decorating: first the lights, then the garlands, then the ornaments, and finally the candy canes and glittering icicles, many of which made their way into our cats’ mouths and through their innards until they dangled out the other end a day or two later. The tree smelled fresh and earthy, and I couldn’t wait for the sun to go down so we could get the full effect of the colorful lights—even while I lamented how quickly Christmas break was flying by. When we were small, we’d bake cookies, making extra to leave out for Santa along with a bowl of sugar for his reindeer. One year, we baked and painted ornaments made from dough.
We’d put the presents out a few days before Christmas, and my brother and I would try to guess what was in each wrapped package. We’d shake them, feel the contours, try to peek under the paper. We got pretty good at it. It was easy to tell what was a book, what was a clothing box, what was a plastic toy of some sort. Some items remained a mystery until we opened them. One year, my brother unwrapped all his presents and then wrapped them up again. He would wake me up on Christmas morning around 6:30 or 7:00, and we’d dash downstairs to check out our stockings, full of chocolate coins in gold foil, a chocolate Santa, clear plastic candy canes filled with M&Ms, a couple of small toys, and usually an orange at the bottom, elongating the stocking and rounding out the toe in a pendulous knob. (When did we give away our stockings? How could we ever have let them go?) Everyone else would then get out of bed, my parents would make coffee, and we’d settle around and take turns unwrapping presents. Our father was always a sight to behold on Christmas morning: barely awake, squinting, hair sticking up every which way, and a huge scarf around his neck.
And the presents! Our mother was a great present buyer. Some cherished gifts include a Shaun Cassidy record, my Barbie Townhouse, and the electronic games Simon, Merlin, and a hand-held Pac-Man. I remember a soft, floppy, white stuffed animal rabbit from my sister one year. I named him Tinkerbell. My brother got the hand-held Mattel football and hockey games, which I would sneak into his room to play. One year, he got skis, placed under the tree sometime during the night. When he ran downstairs and saw them, he dropped to his knees and kissed them. And our poor parents, feigning delight at the presents we got for them when we were young. Ted presented our mom with a plastic figure of a nun one year. (“I loved that nun,” he said to me recently.) I once bought my dad Calvin Klein cologne. Preposterous. One year, my sister, a professional ballet dancer at the time, gave me a necklace with a colorful fish pendant that she’d bought in Taiwan, where her company had recently toured. And I promptly lost it—that morning, not twenty minutes after I opened it. We searched everywhere for it, all morning, but it must have been swept up with the piles of wrapping paper and put out with the trash. Over thirty years later, I’m still sorry about losing that necklace. After opening presents, we had breakfast and then went to Mass. Or did we go to Mass and then have breakfast? Christmas music played on the turntable or radio all day long, and special snacks were out for the duration as well.
We always had holiday dinners with the Mast family across the street, trading off each year. One year, we’d have Thanksgiving dinner at our house and Christmas dinner at theirs, and vice versa the following year. Before dinner, while the adults were finishing getting everything ready, all the kids—we three and the four Mast children—would scope out the presents. After dinner and dessert (complete with flaming plum pudding if we were at the Masts’), we’d cross the street to the other house to check out the presents over there. I vividly recall those cold dashes across the street and the fleeting moment of melancholy upon entering the dark, empty house. We’d turn on the lights, look at the presents, and then run back to the warmth and bustle of the other home. My husband has similar stories: the tree, the food, the presents, the magic of the morning, and, in his case, the visiting relatives or car trips across the city to see aunts, uncles, and grandparents. A lifetime ago, still so vivid in our minds.
*****
Recalling his past, the narrator of A Child’s Christmas in Wales conjures a realm of high adventure fusing the primordial with the modern:
Years and 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 afternoon in damp front farmhouse parlours 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 snowed.
The boy he’s talking to interrupts him. “It snowed last year, too,” he exclaims. “I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.” The narrator replies, “But that was not the same snow.”
At other points in A Child’s Christmas in Wales, the young boy listening to the older man interjects his own experiences, but they cannot compare to the elder’s. As the narrator states, snow in his day was more exciting and alive. “Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash 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.” The narrator recalls church bells ringing, while the boy “only hear[s] thunder sometimes, never bells.” In truth, then, was the narrator’s childhood actually fairly run-of-the-mill? Is it only in the throes of nostalgia that the magic arises? Does he experience his current life as disappointing, sorrowful, or dull, leading him to remember a childhood where everything was more—more special, more thrilling, more intense? Sweeney tells us “nostalgia is not to be thought of as an irrational desire to re-experience but as a rational desire to take a break from the experiences of the present and to seek refuge in previously felt emotions.” Despite the narrator’s lavish descriptions of the material world, perhaps the emotional tenor of the time is what he’s really after. When my husband and I reflect on what it was like to be a kid at Christmas, aren’t we seeking the feel of it, seeking “refuge in previously felt emotions”? I would say yes, especially as a dreadful 2020 slouches to an end.
What intrigues me most about A Child’s Christmas in Wales is the narrator’s uncanny experience on Christmas morning of running headlong into his doppelgänger. He builds up to it by remembering one of the coveted Useless presents: candy cigarettes. “[Y]ou 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.” Then he would go home for breakfast and afterwards head back outside and walk down to the “forlorn sea,” describing other boys and men doing the same, year after year. “Then I would be slap-dashing home,” he says:
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 tinselled windows, the whole length of the white echoing street.
Perhaps the anecdote is the narrator’s means of acknowledging the commonality of his experiences—that masses of mischievous boys ran about on Christmas day with their whistles and their candy cigarettes. (We had them, too. What on earth were our parents, and candy manufacturers, thinking?) Far from playing the hero in his own adventure, he’s just another boy on the street—something the other boy materializing in front of him seems to understand, taunting the narrator-as-boy with his “violet wink” and deafening blast of his whistle. Hence the narrator’s hatred of his doppelgänger—an omen to him then, a reminder to him now of life’s sameness, of routine, of growing old.
Yet in relating the incident, the narrator says “you” did this and “you” did that. A colloquialism, no doubt, but it may also be read as the generic “you,” as if he knows he’s one among many and that that’s all right. After all, kids need a cohort, a sense of belonging, a group of like-minded friends. Nevertheless, the incident confounds him. That sudden rush of hatred! He then tells of running back home, where “at tea the recovered Uncles would be jolly; and the ice cake loomed in the centre of the table like a marble grave”—an odd, gloomy simile for a child to seize upon, but not for an adult. The episode wraps the narrator in a memory feedback loop intertwining his current and past selves and reminding him that childhood will be over in a flash.
*****
I can appreciate the uncanny feeling of running into yourself. Every academic conference I’ve been to has been full of women like me: similar clothes, glasses, shoulder bags, and shoes. These women are my people, beloved to me, yet we can be spotted a mile away, a disconcerting fact driven home when I took the GRE in Chicago many years ago, before it was available online. There were about fifteen people in the room. The proctor distributing the tests called out the subject, and people would raise their hands. “History! Chemistry!” When she called, “English literature!” four of us, all young women, raised our hands, and a guy seated in front of me turned around, gave us all the once over, and said, “Gee, I never would have guessed.” What gave us away? Glasses? A bun held in place with a pencil?
Even worse was interview season at MLA—the Modern Language Association’s annual conference and cattle call. One year, some article, probably in the Chronicle of Higher Education, decreed that a saturated purple was the “in” color—sophisticated and professional—and right on cue, hundreds if not thousands of job applicants roamed the host city sporting a deep purple blouse, scarf, or necktie. The same unsettling sensation arose any time I heard my students parrot something I said. I always thought I wanted my students to listen to me and remember what I said during class. But when it came back to me verbatim in an essay, exam, or class discussion, I found it unnerving. Disappointing, somehow.
A Child’s Christmas in Wales draws to a close with the narrator recalling the warm, drowsy post-meal evening as the aunts sip wine and sing, and laughter fills the room. When he gets into bed, he gazes up at the moon outside his window, looks at the lights in other people’s homes, and “hear[s] the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. . . . I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept”—a sentence rivaling in its power and beauty the last sentence in James Joyce’s “The Dead”: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” The narrator doesn’t mind going to bed, for he anticipates the sense of peace it will bring, and I imagine he must be worn out after running in and out of the house all day and after the high, sustained emotional pitch of Christmas. I can’t remember if I resisted going to bed on Christmas night. Probably not. We would have been deliciously worn out, too, and I loved lying in bed looking at the colorful electric candle in my bedroom window.
I don’t remember my parents talking much about their childhood Christmases, but I can guess what they must have been like, since our family traditions surely stemmed from theirs. They grew up in modest homes with siblings and, like the narrator of A Child’s Christmas in Wales, had visiting aunts, uncles, and grandparents. I can easily picture my father outside in the snow of a Wisconsin winter, raising hell with his friends. I can envision my mother gathered around the dinner table or the tree with her parents and aunts, who were like mothers to her. I hadn’t really thought about it much, but after reading A Child’s Christmas in Wales and “attempting to purposefully trigger nostalgia,” as Sweeney writes, I’m glad to have these tableaux of their young world in my mind that bring to life the few faded photographs I have of them as children. And I feel a sense of peace imagining them now in the “close and holy darkness” of eternal slumber.