'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
