Christmas in Wales
One of my goals in life has always been to live in a book, or to become one — not in the manner of the ending of Fahrenheit 451 but rather more like popping into chalk pavement pictures as Jane and Michael Banks did with Mary Poppins. This Christmas, it actually happened.
There is a wordless little book, evocatively illustrated, called Christmas by Peter Spiers that I used to not-read to my little boys every Christmas and which, these days I savour alone, on pre-Christmas nights, when it becomes a travel book, a destination.
This white and far away winter, my sojourn into Spier’s book was almost uncanny. I had left the book in California when I came to teach at a Welsh university for Michaelmas term. And I missed it as the days darkened and shortened in this remote and tiny village. But as I looked down the street one beautifully bleak and wet January morning I felt myself on a page of that book that depicts a blustery post-Christmas day in a small New England village.
And somehow, it seemed to be this village this day, as I looked out the window at the same bundled, capped men, the same umbrella-ed women with their tidy hats and (as Dylan Thomas, a native of these parts, said) “wind-busked cheeks” and the same sad Christmas trees on the glistening pavement, ready for the dustman, an odd forgotten ornament still attached to one branch — a bit of tinsel trailing in the gutter. The bakeries were just opening, their windows casting yellow beams out into the still dark morning (it does not really get light until about 8:30 a.m.) illuminating the tired, beribboned Christmas cakes in their windows, now half price. And I began to remember something.
My mother sent me a Christmas cake this year as she does every year — a beautiful, heavenly, unduplicatable, indescribable nut-filled fruited cake, wrapped in cheesecloth, soaked in brandy. This wondrous cake brought Christmas Past into Christmas Present and I remembered the Spier book once again later that night when in my new cherry red dressing gown, I sat down with a cup of tea and a piece of that cake, and, like the happy, exhausted parents in the book, reflected on the days just gone by.
I did buy a Christmas cake to serve to others since my mother’s cake is too precious to dispense with a free hand. And now it sits along the wizened tangerines on the sideboard, the plastic Santa on the white icing, leaning a bit too far into the cut edge or precipice, the holly beside it dropping dark berries with the shudder of every passing lorry.
There is a lone mitten in the street. Christmas wrap is “greatly reduced” in the stationers, and the chestnuts have disappeared from the grocer’s shelves. The shopkeepers have removed their holiday themes from the windows, and if this all sounds somewhat melancholy — it is not. There was joy in remembering something — realizing something — and that was having been in and of a charming and innocent book and not recognizing it because it was real. Illustrated, documented, imagined by someone else a long time ago, yes, but real all the same.
Looking back, the whole holiday had a Spier-like ambiance, from the one night in the year — the week before Christmas — when the shops stayed open “late” (7 p.m.!) and the whole town was alight with lights- until now, the Twelfth Day of Christmas.
That “late night” the local fire engine, which has seen better days and is about the size of our SUV, decked out with wreaths and real live holly, drove flocks of children up and down the minute, abbreviated length of the one main street in the town, while the others, excitedly but patiently waited their turns, queuing in front of the pub, chewing on all manner of sweetmeats handed out to them by the local shopkeepers. Looking at those children, and returning their ecstatic waves, I tried to imagine a Los Angeles child of ten enjoying this, and failed. This is not a criticism, exactly. Disneyland is forty minutes away. These children, had they been born in Southern California would be the same as those who are. But I am glad that they weren’t.
There were chestnuts being roasted in big copper pans, and grilled lamb-burgers in buns, sausages, jacket potatoes, meat pies. Two large inept men tried to make popcorn (rarely seen here) in a huge and ancient drum, but they used fresh Welsh butter to pop the corn in. We were thinking of telling them to use oil, but we did not want to be “the Americans” barging into their world and telling them how to do things, and of course it burned. The children ate it anyway.
The Women’s Institute were doing a brisk business in jams, chutneys, buns, rock-hard cakes, cups of tea and knitted goods. (The W.I. as it is known, is the backbone of Britain’s rural female population — it is a club [though club is really the wrong word — it is more like a tribe] which does everything from putting on amateur dramatics and fetes for fundraising purposes to making cheese and teaching basic household skills to “the feckless” as they used to be called but are now more kindly called “underprivileged”. Their staunch faces, tweed skirts, fresh complexions, tidy hair, confident, bustling busyness have not changed since the War and put me in mind of yet another book: Miss Marple.
Along the streets, complete in his 18th century regalia, the town crier heralded every event accompanied by the mayor in even more splendid robes and a chain of office bigger than the Lord Chancellor of England’s, strolling the streets, stopping to talk to everyone. All of the shops, including the bank, served little mince pies and wine (mulled or not) to everyone. In some cases, the young children of the family businesses were busy filling cups with wine and passing them round to people and having a bit of a nip as well (no arrests, no law suits, and apparently no licenses). In any case, I saw our local policeman having a few cheering cups himself so he could hardly protest.
At the end of this evening, which contained far more than I can depict (like a Santa in a lopsided hut for all the little children to visit — children, who, we noticed, came away with some hefty merchandise very generously donated by the sweet shops) the Welsh Men’s Choir gathered in the town square accompanied by a small brass band consisting of about ten skinny self-conscious and brilliantly talented youths from nearby Aberystwyth with blue fingers and bluer lips wielding their chilly metal instruments in the cold night air.
The town crier bossily handed out choir books to the little crowd gathered in the square, announced with oratorical flourish every carol and proclaimed which verses would be sung in Welsh and which in English. There were some carols in Latin.
I would be hard put to describe the clear eyes and dignified lined faces of these (mostly older) men, each with a starched white or checked shirt, tie and sweater under his jacket, and the unmistakable authenticity of feeling with which they sang these old, traditional carols. It was very clear that they loved, believed in and meant these words.
They sang out into the bitter and festive winter evening and the brass band tried manfully to keep up with them but they had no jackets or gloves and the instruments were just too cold — so in the end, the last few carols were sung a cappella which was as lovely.
The ambiance that night — the combination of youth and age, the rich Welsh timbre of these male voices — the fainter, higher, lacier tones of the women in the audience, the icy air, the scent of chestnuts and spiced wine, the warmth of the small community, most of whom are related or have been friends and/or neighbours all their lives is beyond my powers of description. Suffice to say that it was just one of “those moments” in life when for a few brief shining moments the universe just seemed right.
That simple evening was a book in essence — distilled experience — emotion enacted rather than recollected in tranquility — it was Spier, Austen, Thomas, Trollope and Dickens and so much more. But it was also my life, here, now, real. A book, made manifest. The words, made flesh. That was the miracle of Christmas.
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First Published in Carpe Articulum Literary Review, 2012
