December 7, 2009
Monday

. . . then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.
— Dylan Thomas, 1914-1953
Welsh poet, writer, and dramatist
from A Child’s Christmas in Wales

When [his mother] had left him, he lay in the dark listening to the sound of the fine snow as the wind drove it against the panes. The wolf was out there in the night, running along paths that no one had ever seen, down the hill and across the meadow . . . [the wolf] shook himself and climbed up the bank to where Donald was waiting for him. Then he lay down beside him, putting his heavy head in Donald’s lap. Donald leaned over and buried his head in the shaggy fur of his scruff. After a while they both got up and began to run together, faster and faster, across the fields.
— Paul Bolwes, 1910-1999
American composer, author, and translator
from “The Frozen Fields”

A Child’s Christmas in Wales is Dylan Thomas’s account, certainly largely autobiographical but also certainly embellished by a tendency to soften and sweeten childhood memories, of a typical Christmas in a seaside Welsh town such as the one where the poet grew up. It’s got mischievous boys lying in wait to harry the neighborhood cats, a Christmas Eve kitchen fire that the boys douse with the snowballs meant for the cats, addled aunts, loud, loquacious uncles, and presents both Useful and Useless. Published a year after Thomas’s death, it has become a “holiday classic,” as familiar and beloved as A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Luciana Pavarotti singing “O Holy Night” and the California Raisins going a-wassailing.

A piece that draws so heavily on all the things that imbue Christmas memories with a Thomas Kinkade holy light could easily become so sugary and sentimental that your teeth would sprout cavities. But Thomas’s wonderful language lifts the story up and away from the banal. He even gives a nod to the difficulties by announcing right off that “One Christmas was so much like another” he can hardly distinguish them. “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.”

I read A Child’s Christmas in Wales at least once every December. I’ve filched from it, calling my holiday memoir A Child’s Christmas in Harrisburg and picturing my memories as tagged boxes jumbled in a sack like Santa’s that I reach into to draw forth one with which I can dream myself home. In my preface I acknowledge Dylan Thomas with a “deep and gracious bow” for giving me a place to stand as I assembled my own tale.

While Dylan Thomas was speaking his words to the close and holy darkness in Swansea, South Wales, Paul Bowles was growing up in New York City. Before I read his short story “The Frozen Fields” in A Literary Christmas, I had never heard of him, and everything I know about him I have learned from Wikipedia. According to that source, which draws on published material both by and about him, Paul Bowles knew material comforts that were provided by a father who was cold and domineering and who restricted play and entertainment. At 19, Bowles dropped out of the University of Virginia without telling his parents and went to Paris. He studied musical composition with Aaron Copland and was part of the legendary literary circle that gathered around Gertrude Stein. Eventually settling in Morocco, he was a well-traveled, cultured man who excelled as a composer, a writer, and a translator.

I knew when I embarked on reading the selections in A Literary Christmas that I would most likely be reading several that could be considered “anti-Christmas” stories. The editor of the anthology hints at that when she refers to stories that “depict the commercialized farce that some feel the Christmas season has become” and warns that some of the stories are “deeply melancholy.”

“The Frozen Fields” is a masterpiece of craft. Told in third person from the point of view of a seven-year-old boy but never sounding juvenile, it takes the reader back to a time when people traveled by train from the city and then rode in sleighs over the river and through the woods to see their relatives at Christmas. Young Donald has no choice but to journey with his parents to the farm where his mother grew up. Like the unnamed boy in Dylan Thomas’s piece, who might as well be young Dylan himself, Donald finds himself in a houseful of addled aunts and loud loquacious uncles. Only these aunts and uncles are not nearly as jolly as the ones in Swansea. There are tensions and conflicts that Donald is aware of without being able to understand their cause. His more immediate concern is trying to cope with the cold and angry father who belittles him, restricts his activities, and his passive mother who seems helpless against her controlling husband. Being at the farm is a relief, and he finds it “exciting to be in the midst of so many people. Each one was an added protection against the constant watchfulness of his mother and father. At home there were only he and they, so that mealtimes were periods of torture.”

The conflicts that beset Donald’s family erupt at the table. There is shouting, and weeping, and even a hint that physical violence will take place when the verbal combatants are alone. Even a walk to the barn to gather eggs with one of the uncles is ruined when Donald’s father goes along  and puts Donald to a test of snowball throwing that he fails, after which the father punishes him by pushing him to the ground and rubbing his face in the snow and forcing some down his back under his shirt.

We end our time with Dylan in the comfort of the close and holy darkness. Donald’s darkness is just as close, but not so holy, and we lie with him, listening to the snow and the wind and imagining an animal of prey as our savior. One story shows us a childhood Christmas brimful and overflowing with joy, the other one beset by loneliness and disappointment.

If the narrator of A Child’s Christmas is to be taken as a stand-in for Dylan Thomas and Donald as a recreation of Paul Bowles, we should look to what became of these children whose experiences were so different. Dylan Thomas died before he was 40 years old, and although the cause of his death is disputed, it is clear that his liberal use of alcohol as well as other excesses contributed to his fragile health. Paul Bowles died just short of his 89th birthday, having escaped the sadness of his childhood to travel the world and excel in many artistic endeavors.

My own Christmas memories are a mixture of the glorious and the grim, and in my memoir I include one account of a Christmas morning gift-opening session when I was about ten that ended in tears for me. I thought a long time before I put that in, even though both of my parents had passed on before I wrote it. Ultimately, I included it because it helped to make me who I am no less than the joy I knew learning the Poinsettia Song and eating my mother’s sand tarts.

And from now on, every December will include a reading of “The Frozen Fields” as well as A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

From the Archives
December 7, 2005 — Choosing: I had two events I could have attended tonight. One was the annual Holiday Candlelight Concert given by the choral performance groups at the high school my daughter graduated from in 2004. The other was the second weekly session of the first ever Advent bible study sponsored by my Lutheran church.

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