The annual debate about Christmas movies is now reaching its zenith as the holiday nears.
Which version of A Christmas Carol is best? Is It’s a Wonderful Life really good? Skeptics trot out the old canard about how it “only” became famous because television networks kept showing it 30 years after its lukewarm screen reception. (True, but great works of art are not always immediately recognized.) And, does Die Hard count? Did the A.D. 325 Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, as some jokers claim, infallibly declare the 1988 action film a Christmas movie?
Which Christmas film is best is the million-dollar question. Many of us are likely to change our minds over time. We do know certain films, whatever their ranking, do not lose but gain in luster after dozens of viewings.
One movie fitting this category deserves to be better known: the 1987 television film adaptation of poet Dylan Thomas’s prose work A Child’s Christmas in Wales. In an age in which the goods of small towns, extended family, and simple pleasures are not appreciated nearly enough, this film brings us back to essentials.
Thomas’s immortal and eminently filmable short memoir was born as a 1945 talk for the BBC, titled “Memories of Christmas.” A 1947 essay for Picture Post, titled “Conversation About Christmas,” followed. In 1950, he merged the two to create a longer essay for Harper’s Bazaar, which published it as “A Child’s Memories of a Christmas in Wales.”
There, in yellowed magazine pages, the essay might have stayed; however, on a 1952 U.S. tour, some young Americans approached the Welshman about recording poetry and selling it on LP. Thomas agreed, recording five poems on one side. When asked what he wanted to do on the B-side, Barbara Holdridge recalled, “He thought for a minute, and he said, ‘Well, I did this story that was published in Harper’s Bazaar that was a kind of Christmas story.’”
Thomas showed up, as was his wont, to the recording session without the essay, so the Americans had to track down a copy. Once in his hands, however, Thomas’s reading enthralled them. “We had no idea of the power and beauty of this voice,” Holdridge reflected. “We just expected a poet with a poet’s voice, but this was a full orchestral voice.” Readers can test her judgment since the recording is available on YouTube.
Sadly, Thomas, a stereotypically tortured poetic soul with alcohol problems, died less than a year later at the tender age of 39. His work lived on, however. Published in book form in 1954 with other Thomas poems, it was released as a standalone version in 1955. Later printings would feature illustrations from famed illustrators Fritz Eichenberg, Ellen Raskin, Edward Ardizzone, and Trina Schart Hyman. The work inspired songs as well as stage and screen adaptations.
The adaptation discussed here—also blessedly available for free on YouTube—was released in both the United States and the U.K. in 1987. Screenwriters Jon Glascoe and Peter Kreutzer situated Thomas’s sparkling memories of his Swansea, Wales, childhood within a larger story of a grandfather and his grandson on a rainy Welsh Christmas.
The film begins with the boy soprano voices of the Toronto Boys Choir providing a medley of “Silent Night” leading into “Deck the Halls” as the camera pans over hands decorating a Christmas tree. A small boy named Thomas looks out at pouring rain, wishing it were snow, as an old man holds a Christmas angel for the top of the tree. It’s Christmas Eve, and the boy’s parents and grandfather are finishing off the tree decoration. Thomas gets to put the angel at the top.
After a toast, the boy opens up a Christmas box to find an exquisite snow globe. The globe, we are told, was given to the grandfather, played by Denholm Elliott, long ago. As the boy asks about Christmas when his grandfather was a boy, the camera closes in on the snow inside the globe and then fades into a vision of a small, seaside Welsh town with merchants, walkers, and boys engaging in snowball fights in the street.
Grandfather tells how he and his friend, young Jim Prothero, used to throw snowballs at the cats and how they were called back one Christmas Eve to the Prothero house by Jim’s mother, panicking because of a fire. The boys throw snowballs at the fire before calling the fire brigade from the telephone box in the street. Hilarity ensues at the fire brigade’s entrance and the spraying down of the house.
Gorgeous photography of a small Welsh town in winter (it was filmed in Wales and Canada) punctuates Denholm Elliott’s moving recital of Dylan Thomas’s gorgeous prose about the bells ringing out their joy on Christmas Eve and the adventures of a young boy experiencing the romance of freedom to roam in a small town.
Interrupting the story, young Thomas announces he will stay awake to see Father Christmas. His grandfather tells him he also tried this unsuccessfully when young. He retrieves an old album to show Thomas pictures of the previous generations.
The black-and-white pictures come alive in glorious and moving color as the grandfather tells of a particular Christmas past, when his thwarted wish for a catapult as a gift was compensated for by a hatchet—quickly taken from him by his mother. His childhood toys come alive in his own boyish eyes. Toy soldiers engage in battle and march; we hear the blasts of gunfire and the cry of the bagpipes.
Grandfather was, as the snowball attacks upon cats revealed, a “scamp” who blew a dog whistle from behind a couch to make the family canine bark furiously and took his candy cigarettes outside to trick old ladies into scolding him for smoking.
Most of his fun was clean and innocent, however. Snow angels in a graveyard, faces in the reflection of shop windows, and peeks into the celebrations of fellow townsmen make up his afternoon.
The Christmas dinner is a kaleidoscope of fun, with all those uncles and aunts, complete with colored hats, downing meat, potatoes, jellies, and, the coup de grâce, a “blazing pudding” that causes the boy’s eyes to widen in anticipation.
As the afternoon turns to night, the boy and his friends go caroling before returning home. The Welsh are famous for singing, and their Christmas Day concludes around the piano for carols and songs. Squeezed between two plump aunties, he feels the glory of his family. With a kiss for his parents and each auntie, he carries his candle upstairs to his room, where he gazes out the frosted window onto falling snow, turns down the gas lamp, and climbs into bed.
As his family’s rendition of the carol “All Through the Night” continues, we return to the now-grandfather finishing his tale with the shining eyes of pain and joy at his memories. Gazing down at young Thomas, he turns to the window, the rain now turned to snow.
A little less than an hour, this movie never fails to bring smiles and tears. More importantly, it provokes watchers to remember their own Christmases past. A Child’s Christmas in Wales does what all great art should: produce in the viewer wonder and gratitude.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.
