A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas.
Title: A Child's Christmas in Wales.
Author: Dylan Thomas.
Genre: Non-fiction, literature, prose poetry, autobiography, YA, children's lit.
Country: Wales.
Language: English.
Publication Date: Recorded in 1952, published in 1955.
Summary: The work captures a child's-eye view, and an adult's fond memories, of a magical time of presents, aunts and uncles, the frozen sea, romanticized version of Christmases past, a nostalgic and simpler time, and in the best of circumstances, newly fallen snow.
My rating: 8/10.
♥ 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 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 heart-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 hill bareback, it snowed and it snowed.
♥ 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 and 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 why.”