{"id":6191,"date":"2015-12-18T02:28:43","date_gmt":"2015-12-18T07:28:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spritewrites.net\/?p=6191"},"modified":"2015-12-18T05:31:00","modified_gmt":"2015-12-18T10:31:00","slug":"advent-day-18","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spritewrites.net\/?p=6191","title":{"rendered":"advent: day 18"},"content":{"rendered":"

I first encountered Dylan Thomas in college, when we had to read his radio play Under Milkwood<\/em> for a freshman-year English class I took. After college, I lived in a town where one of the performance spaces did a reading of A Child’s Christmas in Wales<\/em> every year as their Yule production. I was instantly transported back in time and across the sea:<\/p>\n

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One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether 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. 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, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into the wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Reading Thomas’ words is lovely, but it’s even better to hear Thomas himself read them to you:<\/p>\n