Short Story Analysis: A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, Part 1

You can read the story here.  

After you read it, you can listen to Dylan Thomas read the story at the embedded YouTube video at the end of this post.

I have to say, this was a strange piece, but an entertaining and charming piece once you understand it.  From what I gathered, it was mostly improvised, so either the rhetorical shifts were planned or more likely ad hoc.  I would not call this piece a traditional short story.  I'm not sure I would call it a story at all since characters do not encounter conflicts which are eventually resolve.  While Thomas uses a lot of narrative, I think the best genre to place this piece in is a personal essay, which is a prose narrative derived from experience.  This is a nostalgic reminiscing of what the narrator's Christmases were like. 

The narrator is Dylan Thomas himself, obviously since it is personally derived, and as to being prose I might argue it is heightened prose, almost prose poetry.  This shouldn't surprise us.  Dylan Thomas is a well-known poet. 

Let me just point out the rhetorical shifts.  It starts with a generic "One Christmas was so much like the other..." and then into that marvelous metaphor of a snow pile representing piles of Christmases, he plunges his hand and pulls out one specific Christmas.

All the Christmases roll down towards 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.

This one Christmas is the time when there was a fire at his friend's house, and Thomas narrates the events that led him and his friend to call the fire brigade which put out the fire.  That narrative runs several paragraphs until the fire is put out when Thomas returns back to a summary narrative, “Years and years ago, when I was a boy…”  But at the end of that paragraph Thomas has a small boy interject: “But here a small boy says: ‘It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.’"  We realize that until now, it has been a monologue, and with the boy Thomas shifts the story into a dialogue. 

That dialogue sets up a tension between the present Christmas, as represented by the boy, and the past nostalgic Christmas as described by the narrator.  After a few exchanges between the two, the boy’s questions and comments get very short and the narrator’s response get longer and longer and more elaborative.  It’s almost as if there is a call and response—to use a musical term—between the boy’s leading call and the narrator’s return response. 

At one point the narrator brings up three friends from his nostalgic past, Jim, Dan, and Jack, and I think—though the text is not clear—he starts recalling conversations with them, boyish small talk about hippos and throwing snowballs and writing in the snow.  After more reminisces of Christmas activities with his friends, including singing of Christmas carols, the narrator brings the story to an end by recalling going to bed with a prayer.

That’s a little primer on understanding the narrative.  More later on the themes.

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I see two elements of the story that comprises its style, which are critical for understanding the story and appreciating its artistry, exaggeration and humor. 

We see exaggeration everywhere: cats which are described as “sleek and long as jaguars,” snowfall described as coming down in “buckets from the sky,” mittens made for giant sloths, and footprints that were the size of hippo tracks.  The narrator tells us he couldn’t remember if 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.  Whether it was six or twelve days, it would be pretty rare for snow to fall for that many days straight.  Whether it be Mrs. Prothero described as a town crier in Pompei when encountering the fire or the uncles holding out their cigars “as though waiting for an explosion,” Thomas stretches credulity even for a work that is rich in nostalgia.  This is the tone of a tall tale, almost Mark Twainian in style.  One could almost hear echoes of Tom Sawyer in the narrator.

Humor too is everywhere, in almost every paragraph.  Let me point out a few.  When the cries of fire are heard, the boys drop their snowball hunting of cats to investigate. Humorously the narrator ponders, “Something was burning all right; perhaps it was Mr. Prothero.”  And when boys are asked to do something, they throw their snowballs at the fire, just missing Mr. Prothero.  When the fire brigade does come and turn on their hoses, Mr. Prothero just barely escapes from being splashed.  When Miss Prothero, Jim’s aunt comes down after the fire, her words are obliviously disconnected.  “Would you like anything to read?” she asks. 

There are several little boys in the narrative but when the little boy in the present time that serves as a foil to the nostalgic past speaks of his brother knocking down the snowman, he states in a sort of slapstick activity that he knocked down his brother in return.  And in response to that present day boy’s mention of snow, the narrator has to up his tale:

 "But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards."

Oh no, he is saying, you don’t have the same snow we had years ago.  As if the snow back then was really any different.  It’s sort of like the old timer who tells their kids that back when he was a child he had to walk three miles to school with no shoes and frequent blizzards. 

And when the present day boy asks about uncles, the narrator says, “There were always uncles at Christmas.  The same Uncles.”  Ah, those crazy relatives at family Christmas parties.  I still remember my crazy uncles at similar Christmas parties.  Do we all have crazy uncles?  They sure make for good humor.  And the narrator’s uncles were large men, “trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms' length, returning them to their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as though waiting for the explosion.”  These uncles must only smoke these cigars once a year since they seem so inexperienced at it.  And the aunts too are portrayed as humorous: aunts not wanted in the kitchen, sit like “faded cups and saucers,” afraid they might break.  And Aunt Hannah, lacing “her tea with rum, because it was only once a year.”  And yet whenever we see Aunt Hannah she is drinking some sort of alcoholic beverage, so that “once a year” is an inside joke.  She’s obviously a lush. 

There’s one specific type of humor that runs throughout that’s particularly noticeable, that is, mock epic.  Mock epic is a satire of epic elements, undercutting the narrative for humor.  We see the great hunt not of jaguars but of family cats, not with weapons but with snowballs, the two hunters “fur-capped and moccasin trappers from Hudson Bay.”  Goodness, this is Wales, not the Klondike North.  And later in the narrative he recalls he and his friends were “snow-blind travelers lost on the north hills, and vast dewlapped dogs, with flasks round their necks, ambled and shambled up to us, baying "Excelsior."  They are in Wales, not lost the Swiss Alps. 

Extended lists are also a feature of epics, such as in the weapons and horses of Homeric combatants.  In this story the lists are of presents, useful presents such as a zebra scarf that stretch to the galoshes and tam-o’-shanters (type of hat) that fit “victims of head-shrinking tribes.”  And there were useless presents such as a conductor’s outfit with a false nose that came with a machine that punched tickets, “a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow,” some sort of assembly game for “Little Engineers” that came with instructions that no one could figure out, “Oh, easy for Leonardo!” he exclaims, a reference I think to the engineering diagrams of Leonardo da Vinci.  And candied “cigarettes” and dog whistles to drive the old folks nuts.  The humor may be subtle at times, but it’s extraordinaire. 

To compliment these two stylistic elements, I see at least three motifs that run through the story.  First is the religious motif.  We get references to deacons, church bells, bishops ringing bells in the belfry, references to two Christmas carols, both having religious theme, “Hark the Herald” and “Good King Wenceslas.”  The one they sing, “Good King Wenceslas” is about a saintly king braving snowy, winter weather.  And finally there is the concluding prayer “to the close and holy darkness” just before the narrator falls asleep.  The religious motifs are tangential, but they come regularly.

The other motif I noticed is the frequent references to voices and sounds.  The word “voice” is actually mentioned eight times in this little story, and we have references to cat sounds, ocean sounds, gongs “bombilating,” church bells, “rat-a-tat-tat” knocking on doors, bird sounds, a duck toy that makes an “unducklike” sound, dog whistles, and singing, boys singing, cousins and uncles singing, Aunt Hannah singing, probably drunkenly, and even a ghost singing.  Voices and sounds also recur regularly, and given that Thomas is a poet, he would be particularly sensitive to voices and sounds.

The third motif is that of boys.  Boys are frequent throughout the story.  There is the narrator thinking back to when he was a boy.  There is Jim, and then later Dan and Jack, boyhood friends.  There is the boy that interrupts the adult narrator.  They all do boyish things, like throw snowballs at cats, or knocking down snowmen or amble through the snow filled hills, get excited about calling fire brigades, writing in the snow, making footprints in the snow, telling tall tales, and singing Christmas carols.  This is very much a boyish story.  How old do you think these boys are?  They seem a shade older than my son now who is ten, but I take it that they are before puberty.  I kind of envision them as about eleven or twelve.  And Thomas does mention twelve in the opening paragraph, though he isn’t sure.

So when you take these two stylistic elements, exaggeration and humor, and the three motifs, the religious motif, the voices and sounds motif, and the boyish motif, it rolls all together into the central theme of a time of innocence and belonging.  The narrator is looking back at a better time when there was joy and love, even though as a boy you may not have even realized it.  I think the concluding “close and holy darkness” image summarizes this.  Darkness can be fearful, but here it’s close—part of the community—and holy. 

A couple of other thoughts.  I find the name “Prothero” unusual for a Welsh family.  I looked up common Welsh surnames and there is nothing remotely like it.  Check here.  What is the significance?  I can’t put my finger on it but it either was based on a real fact of a family that lived near Thomas or he made it up for a particular reason.  Maybe he liked the way it sounded.  I can’t help hearing an echo of Prospero, the lead character from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  But none of the Protheros seem anything like Prospero.

Another thought.  The story begins with just before going to sleep and ends with falling asleep.  In the first paragraph the narrator tells us that it is “the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep” that brings back the memories of the Christmases from his youth.  The voices and sounds are part of his soul, and as he falls asleep he relives the innocent time.  And then after the exhilaration of a child’s Christmas elation, he gets into bed, says “some words to the close and holy darkness,” and then falls asleep.  Sleep frames the story, pleasant sleep, grace-filled sleep.