I have very happy memories of my childhood years in South Wales and, like most children, I loved Christmas. Of course the late 1950s were very different from today. My own children find it hard to imagine how we could have survived without computers, mobile phones and Facebook, but somehow we managed.
There was a real sense of magic about Christmas day which for me usually started around 4am when I would lie awake in the darkness, my heart racing, to see if Father Christmas had remembered me. I stretched down with my toe to see if I could feel it and – yes – there it was; the delicious weight of the Christmas stocking confirmed I had not been forgotten! And what wonders there were: a lead – yes lead – soldier (can you imagine what the Health and Safety fanatics of today would say); a tangerine; a box of coloured pencils; a penknife (more horrors for Health and Safety); a pomegranate (so exotic); a Davy Crockett hat and, of course, the inevitable “Selection Box” with an assortment of chocolate bars. Compared with today’s mega-boxes, the 1950s Selection Box was a very modest affair, but I loved it because we seldom had access to so much chocolate all at once. For a 9-year old, this was wonderland.
Many years later, I came across “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by Dylan Thomas and fell in love with it. Most people think of Dylan Thomas as a great poet, which of course he was (and I am a lifelong devotee) but fewer people nowadays know that he was a truly wonderful story teller. There is no description more evocative of my own childhood memories than “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”. Listen to the music in these opening lines:
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.
Reading this story was always part of our Christmas tradition, especially when the children were young, but they still love it because of its unique blend of gentle humour and nostalgia. If you don’t know this story or have never read anything by Dylan Thomas, then this is a good place to start.
Happy Christmas!
Dr David Ashton
15th December 2010
