IF YOU are searching for a Christmas gift for a child between the ages of five and 12, the 1987 film adaptation of Dylan Thomas’s prose poem A Child’s Christmas in Wales, available on DVD, is an excellent choice. This production stars the Welsh actor Denholm Elliott, who narrates with the words of the original poem about one man’s memories of his Christmases in a town in Wales. It features snow, firemen dousing flames, “useless” gifts, candy cigarettes and fat uncles dozing in chairs after Christmas dinner. It is funny and poignant, capturing the perspective of both youth and old age. Thomas is especially lyrical on the subject of snow:

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 parlors, 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. 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.”

“But that was not the same snow,” I say. “Our snow was not only shaken from white wash 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 thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards.

Denholm Elliott is exceptionally well cast as the grandfather who gives his grandson the gift of a snowglobe on Christmas Eve. The boy asks his grandfather to tell him about Christmases when he was a boy and the story proceeds from there with simple reminiscences. My family has watched it together many, many times. The “happy hills” and the “duchess-faced horse” now seem familiar.

                                                                      — Comments —

Mabel LeBeau writes:

I had no idea “A Child’s Christmas in Wales“ was from Dylan Thomas’ recollection. We used to watch it on Christmas day for several years on PBS when we had a TV. Every year, watching it was a little like a ritual savoring of home-made bonbons as a family time to treasure. And, every year, I used to wonder why there weren’t more programs like it available for a Christmas treat. And, now I know since it was actually a written story.

Please follow and like us: