A Child's Christmas in Wales

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A Childs Christmas in Wales 1954

A Child's Christmas in Wales

'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...' writes Dylan Thomas in his classic A Child's Christmas in Wales. In a blizzard of snowy images on the ringing, rednosed pages Thomas carries the reader to a time 'when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the colour of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills..., and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motorcar, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed'. All who have read A Child's Christmas in Wales will remember 'the cold postman, with a rose on his button-nose, tingling down the tea-tray-slithered run of the chilly, glinting hill'. Memorable too are the Christmas presents: 'bags of moist and many-coloured jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor's cap'. Some may prefer the '...toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknels, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh...' None can forget 'the few small Aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edges of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers', and of course the Uncles who after dinner 'sat in front of the fire, loosened all buttons, put their large moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little and slept'. In the Puffin edition of A Child's Christmas in Wales, author Dylan Thomas and illustrator Edward Ardizzone, to quote Junior Education, 'work a magic that will last for ever - enough to make anyone believe in Father Christmas'.

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'Dylan Thomas and Edward Ardizzone work a magic that will last for ever - enough to make anyone believe in Father Christmas.'

Junior Education