The Twelve Days of Christmas

'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 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.'


From: A Child's Christmas in Wales' by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

I thought I'd make a list of seasonal posts from the blog archive. Here they are for you to choose from.

A very Happy Christmas to all.

Normal service will be resumed next Sunday.

You might like to know that 'Cornish Feasts and Fest­ivals' has just won the Best Local Cuisine book for the UK in the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2013. They are the Oscars of food and drink books!

Well I never.

xxLiz


23 December: Tom Bawcock's Eve

25 December: Yule

31 December: Wassail!

A Good Old Home Christmas



'Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. 

Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.' 

ibid