Dreaming of a White Horse Christmas
My family is not particularly religious and we do not have many traditions. But every Christmas Eve we watch a VHS copy of the BBC’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” It’s the only reason my parents still have a VCR. The program is a dramatization of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’ story of the same name.
I can’t tell you whether or not it’s any good (I suspect that it isn’t) because the experience for me is purely nostalgic. This is in keeping with the spirit of the original text, which while certainly full of beautiful language, is ultimately too sentimental to be “great literature.” It is funny, but in a tender sort of way that is very much at odds with the sort of humor Thomas is known for:
I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't.
That dark, nearly nihlistic streak is nowhere to be found in “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” In fact, that quote, which casts innocence not as a prior, edenic sort of state in which we begin life and grow out of, but as a delusion we live under even as adults to hide from our moral, spiritual and intellectual inadequacy, could almost be a direct repudiation of Thomas’ Christmas story.
The BBC commissioned Thomas to write “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” for a radio special. He did it too make some money. Thomas was an alcoholic. He drank himself to death less than a mile from Knotable HQ, where I’m typing this, at the Whitehorse Tavern in Greenwhich Village. On November 3rd, 1953, Thomas capped off a long day of drinking by throwing back somewhere between 9 and 18 shots of whiskey. He left the White Horse and immediately collapsed on the sidewalk. He died two days later at St. Vincent’s hospital.
I’m tempted to tell you that November 3rd was unseasonably warm for Manhattan. That the temperature dropped over the next two days, and that it began to snow the night Thomas died. But the truth is that it sleeted, and there is no metaphor or meaning to be found in the weather that presided over the lonely death of a tortured alcoholic. (Weather doesn’t preside).
Is this depressing? I don’t know. The deepest optimism, I hope, is optimism after honesty: we can own up to sad truths without being defeated by them. This is the sort of optimism we traffic in at Knotable. And we hope that our weekly missives are a sort of antidote to the boundless and often mindless optimism of tech marketing departments.
We are building something that we think will change the way people work for the better. But for now this is only our belief and experience with the app, and we’re not going to insist on it and hope that our insistence convinces you. We need you to tell us how we are delivering and how we’re falling short. After the holiday break, we will be reaching out to some of you to find out more about how you are using the app and how it can work better for you. We hope you’ll do us the favor of helping us improve.
I will enjoy A Child’s Christmas in Wales this year as I always do. Thomas’ nostalgia for his own childhood will kindle nostalgia for my own. This is possible despite the circumstances under which the poem was written, its final quality as great literature, and my own suspicions about sentimentality.
My horrid secret is that I actually think the story IS great literature, even if Thomas himself would write it off as a quick paycheck. Instead of one more segue back to our app, I’ll leave you with the opening scene. Happy holidays.
One Christmas was so much like the other, in those years around the sea-town corner now, 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 towards 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 that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.
It was on the afternoon of the day of Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero's garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, although there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slide and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes.
The wise cats never appeared. We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal snows—eternal, ever since Wednesday—that we never heard Mrs. Prothero's first cry from her igloo at the bottom of the garden. Or, if we heard it at all, it was, to us, like the far-off challenge of our enemy and prey, the neighbor's polar cat. But soon the voice grew louder. "Fire!" cried Mrs. Prothero, and she beat the dinner-gong.
And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, towards the house; and smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dining-room, and the gong was bombilating, and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier in Pompeii. This was better than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row. We bounded into the house, laden with snowballs, and stopped at the open door of the smoke-filled room.
Something was burning all right; perhaps it was Mr. Prothero, who always slept there after midday dinner with a newspaper over his face. But he was standing in the middle of the room, saying, "A fine Christmas!" and smacking at the smoke with a slipper.
"Call the fire brigade," cried Mrs. Prothero as she beat the gong. "They won't be here," said Mr. Prothero, "it's Christmas."
There was no fire to be seen, only clouds of smoke and Mr. Prothero standing in the middle of them, waving his slipper as though he were conducting.
And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke—I think we missed Mr. Prothero—and ran out of the house to the telephone box.
"Let's call the police as well," Jim said.
"And Ernie Jenkins, he likes fires."
But we only called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and three tall men in helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr. Prothero got out just in time before they turned it on. Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve. And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said: "Would you like anything to read?"
