In its 3,000 words, Thomas covers presents (both Useful and Useless), house fires, candy cigarettes, and the ubiquity of uncles at Christmas. It consists of reminiscences of Thomas’s childhood Christmases, sometimes delivered directly to the reader and sometimes delivered in dialogue with an imagined child listener. “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is a prose narrative, more or less: not quite a short story, not quite an essay, maybe a little bit a prose poem. Don’t you just want to say that out loud a time or two? Can’t you just see the postmen rapping bravely on those frozen doors? Give this sentence a try, describing postmen delivering Christmas packages: “With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully.” Thomas originally developed the piece for the radio, so it’s designed to be read out loud, with the words encouraging you to chew them as you read. It’s the right length, barely 3,000 words long, the length of a mid-sized Vox explainer. But at Christmas, it’s exactly the kind of pleasantly twee and old-fashioned pastime you might be craving.Īnd “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is perfect for those purposes.
The downside is that under most circumstances, of course, reading out loud is insufferable as a group activity. Reading out loud is one of the great communal Zoom activities because there’s a clear order to who’s speaking when and you don’t wind up in that awkward place where everyone is speaking over everyone else’s audio lag. May I suggest that you take turns reading out loud from Dylan Thomas’s “ A Child’s Christmas in Wales”? Something that won’t be affected by an audio lag, which rules out carol singing.
Something you can do at a distance, which mostly rules out dinner and crafting and a lot of board games. In that case, you will need to find some sort of festive holiday activity that every member of your party can participate in. Perhaps you are doing Christmas over Zoom this year.
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