Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - One Christmas Was So Much Like the Other

Episode Date: December 24, 2023

Dylan Lewis shares a family tradition and some well-wishes, however and wherever you might be spending the holidays. Host: Dylan Lewis Engineer: Dan Boyd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You've got to try breakfast at A&W. You've got to try breakfast at A&W. And what better way than with the delicious Pret Organic Coffee? Starting with just one dollar, all day, every day, now until December 31st. You've got to try breakfast at A&W. At participating A&W locations in Ontario. Hey there, fools. Dylan Lewis. No analyst with me over the airwaves today. Just me in the home studio. And I'm here recording a few days before the big day. My girlfriend Jess and I are a day

away from making the trip up to New Jersey to spend Christmas at my mom's. And if I'm being honest, in keeping with tradition, I have not packed at all. Not one bag yet. But I'll get there. I guess I'm not too worried about it because I know the place that I'm heading back to. And I know that if I forget a pair of socks or if I want an extra sweater, I know the drawers and I know the deep recesses of the closets. And I'm sure back there I will be able to find something next to the forgotten toys and collectibles of my childhood. It's a comfort to go back to a place like that for the holidays, and it's a feeling that I haven't had in two years. In 2021, we were supposed to go back to California to do a sunny Christmas with Jess's

family, but we got COVID before our flights and we had to stay home. And so last year, we made up for that by going out to the West Coast. We found ways to have fun with our stay-at-home Christmas, and I had a great time with Jess's family last year, but neither of those years had the rituals that I was used to around the holidays. Going to bed in a hotel room hits a little differently than Christmas Eve cheese fondue around my mom's dining room table. But my mom's house never had a Filipino buffet and holiday cocktail competition. I imagine some of you guys are like me this year,

hosting or traveling somewhere familiar, and some of you might be like me last year, going somewhere new, going somewhere exciting. Unfortunately, I know that some of you are in the same spot I was two years ago, dealing with something a bit unexpected and honestly just trying to make it work. If I'm being honest, I imagine that's how some of our dozens of listeners have felt this year listening to this very podcast. We've gone through some changes, you're hearing familiar voices in new places, and you're hearing new voices all together. We've been working to be both what you expect us to be and ourselves, balancing tradition and change at the same time. Despite being in many different places over the past few Christmases,

I've kept up one tradition that started back at my mom's when I was a kid, and it has been a staple of every holiday season since. Dylan Thomas' A Child's Christmas in Wales. If you're unfamiliar, one, yes, I was named after him. But more importantly, it's kind of a story, it's kind of a poem where Dylan Thomas reminisces about his childhood Christmases in Wales. It isn't one Christmas, but it's the composite of many Christmases that are all kind of woven into a single story the way that really only memory can create. I love it because no matter where home is, it feels familiar. And because at least, if you ask my dad, he wrote much of it while not being in Wales. More accurately, it was written over many years,

and he finally recorded the version that we'll be playing today in New York in his late 30s, a far cry from his childhood. Whether you're where you want to be this holiday or you're figuring it out, I'm happy you're here with us right now, and I hope this, listening to this show, feels like a familiar place you can come back to and also be delightfully surprised by. Speaking for the entire team here at The Fool, we're thankful for the time you spend with us, whenever and wherever that might be. Without any further ado, here's a new twist on Motley Fool Money podcast tradition, A Child's Christmas in Wales, written and read by Dylan Thomas.

One Christmas was so much like the other in those years around the C-Town corner now. 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 towards 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. Protheroe and the firemen It was on the afternoon of the day of Christmas Eve And I was in Mrs. Protheroe's garden Waiting for cats with her son Jim It was snowing

It was always snowing at Christmas December in my memory as white as Lapland Although there were no rangers But there were cats Patient, cold and callous Our hands wrapped in socks We waited to snowball the cats Sleek and long as jaguars

And horrible whiskers Spitting and snarling They would slide and sidle over the white back garden walls And the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I Fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay Off Mumbles Road Would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes The wise cats never appeared

We were so still Eskimo-footed Arctic marksmen In the muffling silence of the eternal snows eternal ever since Wednesday that we never heard Mrs Prothero's first cry from her igloo at the bottom of the garden or if we heard it at all it was to us like the far-off challenge of our enemy

and prey, the neighbour's polar cat but soon the voice grew louder Fire! cried Mrs Prothero and she beat the dinner gong and we ran down the garden with the snowballs in our arms towards the house and smoke indeed was pouring out of the dining room and the gong was bombolating

and Mrs Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier in Pompeii. This was better than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row. We bounded into the house laden with snowballs and stopped at the open door of the smoke-filled room. Something was burning all right. Perhaps it was Mr Prothero who always slept there after midday dinner with a newspaper over his face. But he was standing in the middle of the room saying,

A fine Christmas, and smacking at the smoke with a slipper. Call the fire brigade, cried Mrs Prothero as she beat the gong. They won't be here, said Mr Prothero. It's Christmas. There was no fire to be seen, only clouds of smoke, and Mr Prothero standing in the middle of them, waving his slipper as though he were conducting. Do something, he said. And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke.

I think we missed Mr. Prothero and ran out of the house to the telephone box. Let's call the police as well, Jim said, and the ambulance. And Ernie Jenkins, he likes fires. But we only called the fire brigade. And soon the fire engine came and three tall men in helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr. Prothero got out just in time before they turned it on. Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve. And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room,

Jim's aunt, Miss Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited very quietly to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs and she said, would you like anything to read? Years and years ago when I was a boy when there were wolves in whales

and birds the colour of red flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlours And we chased with the jawbones of deacons The English and the bears Before the motor car, before the wheel

Before the duchess-faced horse When we rode the daft and happy hills bareback It snowed and it snowed But here a small boy says It snowed last year too I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down And I knocked my brother down And then we had tea

But that was not the same snow, I say Our snow was not only shaken from whitewashed buckets down the sky It came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted Out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees Snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses Like a pure and grandfather moss Minutely ivied the walls and settled on the postman opening the gate like a dumb, numb thunderstorm of white-torn Christmas cards.

Were there postmen then, too? With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses on spread, frozen feet, they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully. But all that the children could hear was a ringing of bells. You mean that the postmen went rat-a-tat-tat and the doors rang? I mean that the bells that the children could hear were inside them. I only hear thunder sometimes, never bells. There were church bells, too.

Inside them? No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries tugged by bishops and storks. And they rang their tidings over the bandaged town, over the frozen foam of the powder and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea. It seemed that all the churches boomed for joy under my window And the weathercocks crewed for Christmas on our fence

Get back to the postman They were just ordinary postmen Fond of walking and dogs and Christmas and the snow They knocked on the doors with blue knuckles Ours has got a black knocker And then they stood on the white welcome mat in the little drifted porches And huffed and puffed, making ghosts with their breath And jogged from foot to foot like small boys wanting to go out

And then the presents And then the presents after the Christmas box And the cold postman with a rose on his button nose Tingled down the tea-tray slithered run of the chilly glinting hill He went in his ice-burned boots like a man on fishmonger's slabs He wagged his bag like a frozen camel's hump Dizzily turned the corner on one foot and by God he was gone Get back to the presents

There were the useful presents Engulfing mufflers of the old coach days And mittens made for giant sloans Zebra scarves of a substance like silky gum That could be tug-of-war down to the galoshes Blinding tamashentas like patchwork teak hoses And bunny-suited busbys and balaclavas For victims of head-shrinking tribes

From aunts who always wore wool next to the skin There were moustached and rasping vests That made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all And once I had a little crocheted nose-bag From an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us And pictureless books in which small boys Though warned with quotations not to Would skate on Farmer Giles' pond

And did and drowned And books that told me everything about the wasp Except why Go on to the useless presents Bags of moist and many-coloured jelly babies And a folded flag and a false nose And a tram conductor's cap And a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell

Never a catapult Once, by a mistake that no one could explain a little hatchet and a celluloid duck that made when you pressed it a most unduck like sound a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make a wish to be a cow and a painting book in which I could make the grass the trees the sea and the animals any color I please and still the dazzling sky blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow were billed and pea green birds hard-boiled toffee, fudge and all sorts, crunches, cracknel, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan and

butter Welsh for the Welsh and troops of bright tin soldiers who if they could not fight could always run and snakes and families and happy ladders and easy hobby games for little engineers complete with instructions oh easy for Leonardo. And a whistle to make the dogs bark, to wake up the old man next door, to make him beat on the wall with his stick, to shake our picture off the wall. And a packet of cigarettes. You put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the street and you waited for hours in vain for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette and then with a smirk you ate it. And then it was breakfast under the balloons

Were there uncles like in our house? There are always uncles at Christmas The same uncles And on Christmas mornings with dog-disturbing whistle and sugar fags I would scour the swathed town for the news of the little world And find always a dead bird by the post office Or the white deserted swings Perhaps a robin, all but one of his fires out

Men and women wading, scooping back from chapel With taproom noses and wind-busked cheeks All albinos huddled their stiff black jarring feathers Against the irreligious snow Mistletoe hung from the gas brackets in all the front parlours There was sherry and walnuts and bottled beer And crackers by the dessert spoons And cats in their furabouts watched the fires

and the high-heaped fire spat, all ready for the chestnuts and the mulling pokers. Some few large men sat in the front parlours without their collars, uncles almost certainly, trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arm's length, returning them to their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as though waiting for the explosion. And some few small aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else, for that matter, sat on the very edges of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break like faded cups and saucers.

Not many of those mornings trod the piling streets. An old man, always fawn-bowler, yellow-gloved, and at this time of year with spats of snow, would take his constitutional to the white bowling green, And back as he would take it wet Or fire on Christmas Day or Doomsday Sometimes to hail young men with big pipes blazing No overcoats and wind-blown scarves Would trudge unspeaking down to the forlorn sea

To work up an appetite to blow away the fumes Who knows, to walk into the waves Until nothing of them was left But the two curling smoke clouds Of their inextinguishable briars Then I would be slapdashing home The gravy smell of the dinners of others The bird smell, the brandy, the pudding

And mints coiling up to my nostrils When out of a snow-clogged side lane Would come a boy the spit of myself With a pink-tipped cigarette And the violet past of a black eye Cocky as a bullfinch Leering all to himself I hated him on sight and sound

And would be about to put my dog whistle to my lips And blow him off the face of Christmas When suddenly he, with a violet wink, put his whistle to his lips And blew so stridently, so high, so exquisitely loud That gobbling faces, their cheek bulged with goose Would press against their tinseled windows The whole length of the white echoing street For dinner we had turkey and blazing pudding

And after dinner the uncle sat in front of the fire loosened all buttons, put their large, moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little and slept. Mothers, aunts and sisters scuttled to and fro bearing two reams. Aunt Bessie, who had already been frightened twice by a clockwork mouse, whimpered at the sideboard and had some elderberry wine. The dog was sick. Auntie Dursie had to have three aspirins, but Auntie Hannah, who liked port stood in the middle of the snowbound backyard singing like a big bosom thrush I would blow up balloons to see how big they would blow

up to and then when they burst which they all did the uncle's jumped and rumbled in the rich and heavy afternoon the uncle's breathing like dolphins and the snow descending I would sit among festoons and Chinese lanterns and nibble dates and try to make a model man-of-war following the instructions for little engineers and produce what might be mistaken for a seagoing tramcar. Or I would go out, my bright new boots squeaking into the white world onto the seaward hill to call on Jim and Dan and Jack and to pad through the still streets, leaving huge deep footprints on the hidden pavements. I bet people will think they've been hippos. What would you do if you saw a hippo coming down our street?

I'd go like this, bang! I'd throw him over the railings and roll him down the hill, and then I'd tickle him under the ear and he'd wag his tail. What would you do if you saw two hippos? Iron-flanked and bellowing, he hippos clanked and battered through the scudding snow towards us as we passed Mr. Daniel's house. Let's post Mr. Daniel a snowball through his letterbox. Let's write things in the snow Let's write Mr. Daniel looks like a spaniel all over his lawn For we walked on the white shore Can the fishes see it snowing?

The silent one-clouded heavens drifted onto the sea Now we were snow-blind travellers lost on the north hills And vast dewlap dogs with flasks round their necks Ambled and shambled up to us, baying Excelsior We returned home through the poor streets Where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers In the wheel-rutted snow and cat called after us Their voices fading away as we trudged uphill

Into the cries of the dock birds And the hooting of ships out in the whirling bay And then at tea the recovered uncles would be jolly And the ice-cake loomed in the centre of the table like a marble grave Auntie Hannah laced her tea with rum because it was only once a year. Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. Ghosts wooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder. Animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs where the gas meter ticked.

And I remember that we went singing carols once when there wasn't the shaving of a moon to light the flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand, in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe web-footed men wheezing in caves. reached the black bulk of the house. What shall we give them? Hark the herald? No,

Jack said. Good King Wenceslas, I'll count three. One, two, three. And we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness, round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together near the dark door. good King Wenceslas last looked out on the feast of Stephen and then a small dry voice like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time joined our singing a small dry eggshell voice from the other side of the door a small dry voice through the keel and when we stopped running we were outside our house. The front room was lovely. Balloons floated under the hot water bottle gulping gas.

Everything was good again and shone over the town. Perhaps it was a ghost, Jim said. Perhaps it was Trolls, Dan said, who was always reading. Let's go in and see if there's any jelly left, Jack said. And we did that. 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 onto 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-coloured 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, steadily 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.