Ho ho ho! Or in Welsh, cywnwn cywnwn cywnwn! (Probably. Or definitely not, we don’t speak Welsh). For the first of two Christmas episodes this year, we’re getting all poetic-like -- or rather, prose fiction that follows TONS of poetic conventions -- with Dylan Thomas’s 1952 A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Whether you love Christmas or hate it, this is a beautiful and hilarious piece, and a lot more complex than its surface nostalgia would indicate. We talk mythic vs. historical time, the nation, class, and more, plus Thomas’s notoriously messy (and, ultimately, tragic) biography.

We read the David R. Godine edition, illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. For more on Thomas, two often-cited biographies are those by Paul Ferris (1977) and Andrew Lycett (2003).

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