My mom, Nora, was an amazing woman. She had the uncanny ability to find the right things, always. One of her gifts to our family was to have us gather by the fire on Christmas Eve and listen to the Dylan Thomas recording of A Child's Christmas In Wales. It was on a Caedmon LP, and I think the scratches made it even more memorable.
I also remember watching a PBS special with Thomas reading the poem over images of the Wales of his childhood. It was magical, but my efforts to find it have been in vain.
If you haven't read his poem, or better yet heard the recording of him reading it, all I can say is it's magic. Here are the first few paragraphs. Don't they paint a picture?
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.
All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.
It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero's garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes. The wise cats never appeared.
We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal snows - eternal, ever since Wednesday - that we never heard Mrs. Prothero's first cry from her igloo at the bottom of the garden. Or, if we heard it at all, it was, to us, like the far-off challenge of our enemy and prey, the neighbor's polar cat. But soon the voice grew louder.
"Fire!" cried Mrs. Prothero, and she beat the dinner-gong.
I wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas.
Murrieta Real Estate Expert – Tom Plant, REALTOR® - Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage (951) 907-9701
It would be my honor and privilege to show you the beautiful Temecula Valley. My goal is to over-deliver on what I promise.
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You know what? I've got a feeling 2008 is going to be great! The past year has been a rough one for many. The market has been upside down, many of us have been scrambling to stay afloat. On the other hand, I tend to look at the positive side of things. 2007 was the year I discovered a place called Active Rain. It has literally changed my life.
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