I was introduced to A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas’s nostalgia-rich reflection on what we now euphemistically refer to as “the holidays,” by my Jewish roommate in college. Marty’s three buddies from New York, also Jewish, had driven up to the apartment we shared in Hartford and brought with them the famous Caedmon recording of Thomas reading his story. After Marty and his buddies did a jam session together of rather secular folk songs, they put the instruments away, turned the lights low, lit some candles and dropped the Thomas recording onto the turntable. Thomas’s timeless rhythms, vivid mages and mellifluous voice filled the room—for about 10 minutes. And then my honey, curled up in my arms on a chair in a corner, turned to me and said, “I’ve got to get back to the dorm.”
The two of us—the Catholic boy and the Protestant girl—got up to make our exodus. It was, as exoduses tend to be, calamitous. We stumbled over the bodies outstretched on the carpet around the turntable. We turned on intrusive lights in the next room in our search for coats and hats and boots. We opened the door and the rush of wind blew out the candles. We could not have ruined A Child’s Christmas in Wales more thoroughly if we had broken into our Alvin and the chipmunk voices for a chorus of Hava Nagila.
Marty jumped up and chased us out the door. “What the hell are you doing?” he thundered in a most un-Dylan Thomas like tone.
“Lorna has to get back to the dorm,” I meekly replied. “Curfew.”
“Well, you just ruined everything,” he declared before storming back into the apartment.
Hava Nagila, indeed.
Regular readers of The Nobby Works know that irony is a specialty of the house, so here goes. For the next 16 years, Lorna and I made sitting around listening to A Child’s Christmas in Wales the climatic part of our Christmas celebrations, exposing an always-appreciative audience of holiday guests to its sublime charms. In my teaching days, I would even play it as a send-off for my students on their way to their winter vacations. (Truth be told, the recording often had a soporific effect on both the adolescents I was teaching at school and the children I was rising at home—not a bad thing in either case.) Then in 1983 I took my recording to a Christmas party to share with friends. I announced the record at the outset of the evening to our host, who graciously added it to the agenda for the evening. At the appointed hour, the needle touched down on the vinyl, and Dylan Thomas began to weave his magic spell over the room—for about 10 minutes. Then the spell was broken by the host who turned and mentioned—quite aloud--that he had been to a stage play the previous week where he had seen John Travolta prance down the aisle with his boyfriend—or so my host identified him. There immediately ensued a conversation between our host and another guest about the sad career and sexual orientation of John Travolta (this, by the way, would be at that deep, dark decline in Travolta’s career between Urban Cowboy and Pulp Fiction). Needless to say, our host could not have ruined A Child’s Christmas in Wales more thoroughly if he had broken into Alvin and the chipmunk voices for a chorus of Hava Nagila.
Nay! He couldn’t have done a more ruinous job if he had gotten up, dropped his pants and taken a dump on my record as it heroically tried to makes its way around the turntable. Channeling the outrage of my old roommate Marty, I arose from my seat, marched over to the turntable, lifted the arm, and rescued Dylan Thomas from further insult. The memory of that night has been so painful that I haven’t played A Child’s Christmas in Wales since.
But then the pain of Christmas has been building for many for some time now, hasn’t it? Our friends the socialists suffer from the pain of watching capitalism and consumerism run amuck from Black Friday to December 26. Our friends the atheists suffer from the pain of watching friends and relatives drag full-sized trees into their houses in unwitting replication of ancient pagan ritual. Our friends the merchants suffer from the pain of having to balance celebration of the season with recognition that not all their customers celebrate it. And our friends the FOX News viewers suffer the pain of being the victims of a delusional war on their beliefs and prejudices.
“That most wonderful time of the year” has been reduced to a minefield of resentment, mockery, bigotry, rudeness, intolerance, and utter Grinchitude. Christmas has become just another battleground in the miserable, endless partisan struggle that’s pulling the entire country down. Someone said “Merry Christmas” to me the other day, and I was immediately asking myself, “Did he just make a political statement?” In such an atmosphere, could Irving Berlin have written White Christmas? Would my roommate Marty have even thought to play A Child’s Christmas in Wales?
Here's a closing passage from A Child's Christmas in Wales:
“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 web-footed 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.
We have become, as a nation, like those children in Wales at Christmas—at that moment on the end of the long, dark road--armed and afraid of the wind in the trees, fearful of the small, dry voices of unknown others. We panic at the ghosts and trolls that inhabit our imaginations, but unlike those lucky boys, there seems to be no jelly—or much else--to comfort us. Though this Christmas, I believe, I'll give Dylan Thomas another try.