A Child's Christmas in Wales: Revisited

Reflections on Lost Innocence, Dylan Thomas, My Father, Santa

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, steadily galling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

“A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” Dylan Thomas

I have behind me the memories of seventy-seven Christmas nights, when, the carols sung, the presents opened, the meal savored and finished, the aunts and uncles and grandmothers and little children kissed and bid goodnight, I “turned the gas down, got into bed, said some words to the close and holy darkness, and slept.”

I love Thomas’ lyrical story.  I have an old copy of it from a reading of it a group of friends held in our living room on the twentieth floor of a high rise overlooking the lights of Chicago and the black, cold, empty space of Lake Michigan in 1972, the year before we moved to Maine. Since then, the nostalgic lament for the lost innocence of childhood I find in this story has transformed into a deep keening sound that echoes silently inside my body. Over the years, the losses of that innocence have mounted in ways I would have found inconceivable back in 1972.

As I write this, the voice of my 11 year-old granddaughter screeching in delight rises from the basement. She is playing foosball with her grandfather and every goal brings a higher note of joy. She is still blissfully unaware of this moment of crisis for the forest around us and the ocean a mile away and, too, her future. I fear for the day when, all too soon, the awareness of these threats will collide with this joy.

This Christmas the holy darkness outside her bedroom window and millions of others is the darkness of electricity failure, lines down, trees down, life threatening Arctic cold: holiday celebrations disrupted by yet another “storm of a generation.”  Nature, it turns out, it not too big for humans to have, in the course of a lifetime, created planetary scale disruptions.

Curiously, Dylan Thomas penned the first edition of his famous Christmas story the same year I was born — 1945, the year mankind’s nostalgic innocence, so beautifully conjured by Thomas in this story, was ripped away when we dropped the atomic bomb on a tree lined city in Japan. I know it had trees because the year my father died, I discovered, hidden in a cardboard box behind the heaving metal furnace in the basement of my childhood home, reconnaissance pictures of Hiroshima before the bomb, pictures he’d taken as a Captain in the Army Air Corp trained in reconnaissance to guide the Enola Gay to its sweet spot over the sleeping city.  Perhaps this is the original source of the deep sadness, of something irrevocably lost, I experience whenever I read Dylan Thomas’ poem.

But that narrative wasn’t one that (consciously) seeped into my childhood, or my Christmases.   My father never spoke about the war or his role in introducing a weapon of previously unthinkable destruction. Ever. I wonder now about what drove his drinking, what he may have been trying to forget that night he fell off the piano stool while we were all singing carols and my mother cried and ran upstairs.  

The narrative I grew up with was that America was a great and valorous place where dreams could be realized and ambitions for material wealth and status satisfied in larger ways by each succeeding generation.  My great grandfather ran a bar in Grand Central Station, but my father would go to law school and so would his son. The world was our oyster, even though the once fecund oyster beds that flourished around Manhattan Island were, due to man’s ingenuity and dedication to progress, now extinct. 

There were no stories back then to temper this belief in our unending entitlement to expansion by gobbling up all the resources of the natural world, no Grandmother Woodchuck scolding Gluscabe for rounding up the wildlife in the forest in his magic bag and announcing his intention to do away with them all.  There was instead the story about fat Santa winging his way through space with my Christmas wish list in hand, then wriggling, unharmed, down our narrow chimney and carefully arranging, in beautifully wrapped paper, the very things I’d written on that list.

As a child I merged the story of Santa with the story of Christ. One seemed like a different incarnation of the other.  Santa came all the way from the frigid North Pole to bring me gifts, while Jesus Christ relinquished his eternally radiant body and warm spot in heaven to come down to earth to save me! 

For Santa I had to be more nice than naughty; for Christ I had to obey a few commandment: like not lying, stealing, murdering someone or sleeping with my neighbor’s wife.  It was all pretty easy: I could be saved and get a bundle of presents!! 

Meanwhile the rivers would always run clean, the salmon would always spawn in the Spring, the forests would lift its mighty arms towards the sky, the oceans would teem with fish and the temperature would always be Just Right.

In the fifty years since a group of us read that story together, many in that room have died.  As have many of my illusions formed as a child about who I am, who mankind is on the earth and what the earth needs from us in order to thrive. There is terrible grief in all this loss.  And humility.  I can choose among a glittering array of defense mechanisms for this pain: I can deny the dire emergency of this moment in time; I can dissociate and say it’s not my problem, I’m too old, leave it to the young; I could drink and fall off the kitchen stool. 

Or I could take Thomas’ advice, written two years after he’d penned his Christmas story. Thomas wrote his most famous poem, the one with the lines quoted at funerals and handed like strong medicine to those facing pain when he was only 33 years old.

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Yet, ironically, six years later, at the age of 39, in a bed at St. Vincent’s hospital in NYC after a night of drinking at the White Horse Tavern, Thomas would do just that: slip into a coma and go gently into the good night.  Historians are mixed as to the cause of death: was it liver failure from alcoholism, or was it pneumonia?  Likely it was both. 

Like my father falling off the piano bench on Christmas Eve after one too many old fashioned cocktails, just how intolerable was it for Thomas to lose the innocence of his childhood when he realized the destruction mankind was capable of? Though those lines may not have saved Dylan Thomas, this Christmas Eve, the generator still humming in the garage, Thomas’ invocation to not go gentle into that good night rings clear and brave in my mind. 

I will keep writing these essays, keep trying to analyze the old stories that blind us and find news ones to tell about how to sustain not just our manly selves but all species and all life on this planet…for we need all of it, every morsel and cell in order for us to thrive.  No angels are coming to announce the birth of a man-God savior, no Santa is going to slither down the chimney and deliver a healthy planet.  It’s up to me and it’s up to all of us who so love this world to find a way to make this love visible by living our lives in a way that allows all life to flourish.  

For that is what I believe in this Christmas: the power of the beauty of this world to elicit deep love, and the power of art, of words and images to summon that love which brings us the best present of all all — our capacity to share that love, to come out of our isolation and discover that together “we may sing and wallow all night.’

I wish you all much love and joy and the return, if only for a little bit of time, of your own childhood innocence.

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.