“A Child’s Christmas in Wales”

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“A Child’s Christmas in Wales”

THE LITERARY WORK

A short story set in Swansea, Wales, in the early to mid-1920s; published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1950 and in Thomas’s collection of autobiographical sketches, Quite Early One Morning, in 1954.

SYNOPSIS

The narrator remembers his childhood Christmases in a busy Welsh port town.

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place

The Short Story in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Was Written

For More Information

Welsh poet Dylan Thomas was born in 1914, the year that World War I began, in Swansea, on Wales’s southern coast. Like his other autobiographical writings, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is packed with details that vividly illustrate what life was like for a child growing up in Wales between the world wars. The seaside town was a small world of its own—beyond which from the child’s point of view lay a bigger world of mystery and excitement.

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place

Economic and political background

Wales’s vital role in the economic and political life of Great Britain forms the backdrop to Swansea’s prosperity during the era in which Thomas grew up. In the economic sphere, Welsh coal mines had helped fuel the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, bringing fortune both to Wales itself and to Britain as a whole. Welsh foundries, producers of iron and tin among other metals, also contributed to the prosperity, as did more traditional products such as wool and slate, a hard gray rock used in roofing. A shipping industry grew around these exports, giving bustle and purpose to Swansea and other port cities. For a young boy, the vessels linked Swansea to the mysterious outside world. As Thomas writes in another autobiographical piece, they were “ships steaming away into wonder and India, magic and China, countries bright with oranges and loud with lions” (Thomas, “Reminiscences of Childhood,” p. 3).

In political life, Britain’s only Welsh prime minister, David Lloyd George, had recently steered the nation through the dark days of World War I. Pride in Lloyd George’s leadership gave the Welsh a boost in their traditional rivalry with the English. Throughout history, the Welsh have been dominated by their powerful English neighbors, who finally conquered them in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Much of Welsh legend is based on resisting the English. In “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” Thomas evokes such legends, referring to a distant past when “we chased... the English and the bears” (Thomas, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” p. 15).

Poverty

Wales’s prosperity gradually began to decline in the years of Thomas’s boyhood, mostly because oil was replacing coal as industry’s most common fuel. In general, rural North Wales, with its coal mines and sheep farms, was (and is) poorer than the more urban, industrial, and populous South Wales. But even a busy southern seaport like Swansea had impoverished neighborhoods. Near the end of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” Thomas writes of walking through “the poor streets, where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheelrutted snow and catcalled after us” (”A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” p. 20). The situation for the poor worsened as unemployment grew when coal mines shut down in the 1920s. By contrast, Thomas’s own family was financially comfortable in the 1920s; his father, who taught literature at Swansea Grammar School, had a secure job.

Cultural revival

Along with the prosperity it enjoyed, Wales had undergone a revival of its traditional Celtic culture in the nineteenth century. Poetry played the central role in this revival—the biggest cultural event of the year was the eisteddfod, a national poetry and music festival that spanned several days. The festival, still held in the modern era, comes to a climax with a poetry contest, in which a panel of judges crowns the victorious bard, or poet. His poetry must meet the highest standards—and it must be in Welsh. Though usage of the language has declined (today it is spoken by about one in five of the Welsh people), it remains an important symbolic element of the Welsh national character.

Nowhere is this Welshness more strongly expressed, assert various authorities, than in Welsh poetry. In fact, Dylan Thomas was often criticized for writing his poetry in English. As a national icon, the poet in Wales plays a role similar to that of the cowboy in America. Reputed to have mystical powers and linked to the mysterious druids (religious figures from ancient times), bards are the national heroes of Welsh culture.

Anglo-Welsh poets

Thomas began his own poetic career in the 1930s, joining what became an entire generation of other young Welsh poets who were also writing in English. He would become the most famous of these so-called Anglo-Welsh poets, many of whom were friends of his. Like “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” his other writings tend to focus on the inner world. He uses descriptions of the outer world mostly to illustrate the feelings and impressions created in the individual. This approach leaves limited room for treating political or social issues. Others (though by no means all) in the Anglo-Welsh group wrote more directly of such topical issues. Their poems represent concerns that make up an important part of the larger context in which “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is set. As Thomas puts it in a 1946 essay about them:

They wrote, not of the truths and beauties of the natural world, but of the lies and ugliness of the unnatural system of society under which they worked—or, more often during the nineteen-twenties and thirties, under which they were not allowed to work. They spoke of the Wales they knew: the coaltips, the dole-queues [welfare lines], the stubborn bankrupt villages, the children, scrutting for coal on the slagheaps.
(Thomas, “Welsh Poets,” p. 69)

While “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is a fond and light-hearted recollection of childhood, this darker vision remains just below the surface. Thomas, indeed, hints at it with his brief but vivid mention of the “poor streets,” where children with “bare red fingers” have a very different Christmas from the cosy middle-class holiday of his own memories (“A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” p. 20).

The Short Story in Focus

The contents

“A Child’s Christmas in Wales” does not have a plot in the usual sense. Instead the descriptive passages fall into a structure of three parts. The story opens with the narrator remembering not one particular Christmas, but all the Christmases of his boyhood. His memories of them are rolled up together like a snowball going downhill. The narrator picks one memory at random, recalling the Christmas Eve that his friend Jim’s house caught on fire. The fire is quickly put out, and after recounting this amusing episode the narrator breaks off.

In the second section, the narrator imagines a conversation with a young boy, who asks questions about life in the now-distant time of the narrator’s own boyhood. The young boy asks about the postman, whom the narrator depicts as a Santa Claus-like figure, with rosy cheeks and a bag slung over one shoulder. He also asks about presents. In response, the narrator divides the gifts into Useful Presents (mostly woolen mittens, scarves and other items of clothing, and books with no pictures) and Useless Presents (candy, toys, and a coloring book). He then moves on to the family scene: food and drink is set out, mistletoe is hung, cats lounge in front of the fire. The festive house features many relatives—uncles smoking cigars and talking, and aunts sitting quietly.

In the third and final section, we have just the narrator’s voice again. He recalls some sights, sounds, and smells of the town on a Christmas Day. Returning home, he further describes the household. After a turkey dinner, the uncles might nap by the fire while the aunts help to clean up. The narrator describes how he sat and played with a present, or perhaps went out to find some friends and play in the snow or walk down to the seashore. Returning for afternoon tea, he might venture back out into the early darkness to go caroling with friends. Once, he remembers, they sang the Christmas carols in front of a dark and spooky house. Hearing a whispery voice from inside, they all ran away. At home, the family sang songs as well, until the boy went to bed.

Inner world, outer world

Like “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” Thomas’s other autobiographical stories and his poetry both show his fascination with childhood. In particular, Thomas explores the feelings and perceptions special to childhood, often (as in “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”) from the nostalgic point of view of an adult. He shows the reader the outer world (home, Swansea, Wales, and society in general) through the lens of a child’s inner world—but the lens is held up to the eye of an adult, the narrator.

This perspective allows the story “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” to not only expose but also comment on behavior and customs. For example, Thomas gently pokes fun at the uncles and aunts, whose behavior on Christmas morning fits in with the social standards of the day. The uncles smoke cigars and chat, while the aunts sit timidly by:

Some few large men sat in the front parlors, without their collars, Uncles almost certainly, trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arm’s 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 edges of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers.
(“A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” p. 18)

THE POWER OF MUSIC IN WELSH CULTURE

The famous choirs of the South Wales valleys … used to be as much social as artistic phenomena—vehicles of mass feeling, or religious certainty, or universal taste.... When the Victorian miners’ leader William Abraham found himself faced with an unruly crowd, he had only to raise his hands and strike up a hymn, “and hardly had he reached the second line,” a wondrous Scottish observer recorded, “than he had the vast audience dropping into their respective parts, and accompanying him like a great trained choir” (Morris, p. 138).

While both uncles and aunts are figures of fun, the picture also reveals much about the different roles of men and women in British society at the time. In the child’s memories the uncles remain nameless, but the aunts develop into fleshed-out characters. In developing them, Thomas’s story illustrates social attitudes about women. With humor, for example, the story reveals attitudes about women and drinking, which was seen as a man’s activity.

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 [a kind of wine], stood in the middle of the snow-bound back yard, singing like a bigbosomed thrush.
(“A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” p. 19)

The story reveals that Auntie Hannah is bold enough to drink openly, once she offers the excuse of its being a holiday. Auntie Bessie, on the other hand, uses her pretended fear of a windup mouse as a reason for having some elderberry wine. The reader can guess that as a boy the narrator accepted the excuses, but later sees through them. Similarly the boy makes no connection between Auntie Hannah’s liking port and her standing out in the snow belting out a song, though presumably the narrator does. The uncles’ drinking, by contrast, is not even mentioned, though we may be certain that it was going on—men would commonly drink port or brandy, for example, while smoking their cigars.

Sources

Like most of Thomas’s stories, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is loosely based on the author’s own childhood memories. The house is the Thomases’ house at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in Swansea. Both of Thomas’s parents had a number of siblings, and one of the uncles in the story is perhaps his father’s brother Arthur, who lived near Swansea and worked for the railroad. The other uncles and the aunts are probably based on some of his mother’s brothers and sisters. She had seven in all, including a sister named Theodosia. Called Dosie for short, she probably served as the model for the Auntie Dosie who needs aspirin.

SWANSEA AND THE WORLD OUTSIDE

In another autobiographical piece, “Reminiscences of Childhood,” Thomas explains how some well-known aspects of Welsh culture and history left their impressions on him as a youngster:

This sea-town was my world: outside a strange Wales, coal-pitted, mountained, river-run, full, so far as I knew, of choirs and football teams and sheep and storybook tall hats and red flannel petticoats, moved about its business which was none of mine.
Beyond that unknown Wales with its wild names like peals of bells in the darkness, and its mountain men clothed in the skins of animals perhaps and always singing, lay England which was London.... It was a country to which only young men travelled (Thomas, “Reminiscences of Childhood,” p. 3).

In his autobiographical stories, Thomas generally uses a near-even mix of real names and made-up ones that either disguise real people or represent a mix of several people. Auntie Hannah and Auntie Bessie seem to have been created in this last way. Auntie Hannah may have been partly inspired by his mother’s sister Elizabeth Ann (like Auntie Hannah, a singer), whom he called Aunt Polly.

Lastly, the most direct sources for Thomas’s story were the World War II radio broadcast and the postwar magazine article described below.

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Was Written

Postwar recovery

Though they date from the period shortly after World War I, the memories that make up “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” were shaped and recorded just after World War II. Between these two world wars, from 1918 to 1939, Wales saw a steady erosion of its earlier prosperity. With the end of World War II in 1945, however, a period of recovery began for both Wales and Great Britain as a whole, continuing through Thomas’s death in 1953. During the Second World War, Thomas had helped support his family by working in radio and film. After the war, he would continue writing and broadcasting many more radio pieces, including plays, stories, and essays as well as poetry. At times, he was performing a broadcast nearly every week.

Thomas’s rich, melodic voice made the readings very popular. Best known in the literary world as a poet, to the public Thomas became famous for his dramatic readings on the radio. People were eager to forget about the troubles of war and economic hardship, and the humor and cosy nostalgia of many of the pieces struck a chord.

In the final months of the war the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) approached him about doing a holiday broadcast called “Memories of Christmas.” One of the earliest of his autobiographical broadcasts, this would later become part of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.”

Reception

In 1947 Thomas published another short piece about Christmas, this time in the magazine Picture Post. Called “Conversation about Christmas,” it was a dialogue about the holiday between two speakers, “Small Boy” and “Self.” Then, in 1950, he combined that short piece with the earlier “Memories of Christmas” and published the resulting work in the magazine Harper’s Bazaar. He called it “A Child’s Memories of Christmas in Wales.” He was paid $300 for it, a welcome sum since he was always short of cash. None of these pieces received much attention.

Two years later, however, Thomas was in New York, where he had arranged to make a phonograph recording of his poetry. At the last minute, he decided he wanted to read the story from Harper’s Bazaar as well. On the record it received its present title, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” which it kept when published with other works in Quite Early One Morning (1954). Though the record sold slowly at first, since Thomas’s death in 1953 it has become his most famous recording. Its popularity has ensured that the story itself is still widely read. It is especially beloved in America, where Thomas enjoyed several successful reading tours before his death. Many finely illustrated children’s versions can now be found.