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A review by happylilkt
A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas
5.0
October 2023: Read this aloud to my children on the way back from looking at fall color in the scenic Columbia River gorge. The same things that cracked me up as a kid make them giggle and I catch a quiet smile from my husband--so. much. joy.
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"Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlours, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed."
In my childhood, my father would read this to our family at LEAST once a year at Christmas time. My father was Welsh American and loved his Welsh heritage, so reading this to his children was a labor of love. He also had a wonderful narrator's voice: a deep, rich, actor's voice that dwelled lovingly on poetry and prose.
The humor, the crackling style of Thomas's writing, the nostalgia of a Christmas that you never experienced (and that in all probability Thomas never did either) are all present and Trina Schart Hyman's illustrations are at her best.
We now read this with our children with layered nostalgia—it is still one hundred percent joy to read aloud Thomas's beautiful language matched only by the tenderness of missing my daddy.
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"Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlours, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed."
In my childhood, my father would read this to our family at LEAST once a year at Christmas time. My father was Welsh American and loved his Welsh heritage, so reading this to his children was a labor of love. He also had a wonderful narrator's voice: a deep, rich, actor's voice that dwelled lovingly on poetry and prose.
The humor, the crackling style of Thomas's writing, the nostalgia of a Christmas that you never experienced (and that in all probability Thomas never did either) are all present and Trina Schart Hyman's illustrations are at her best.
We now read this with our children with layered nostalgia—it is still one hundred percent joy to read aloud Thomas's beautiful language matched only by the tenderness of missing my daddy.