Motley Fool Money - 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

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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 moms. And if I'm being honest, in keeping with tradition, I have not packed at all. Not one bad 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 have. 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, Hellroom 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 altogether. 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 is 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 Motleyful Money podcast tradition, a child's Christmas in Wales written in red 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 distance 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. I sedged 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 fire-been. It was on the afternoon of the day of Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero's garden waiting for cats with her son Jim. 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. Sleak and long as jaguars and horrible whiskered,

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 mucksmen 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 neighbor'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 ruined 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. Brother O, 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. with a slipper. Call the fire brigade, cried Mrs. Prothero as she beat the gun.

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.

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 noisor Christmas Eve. And when the fireman 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 color of red flannel pettico, 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 parlors, 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 bear back, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy, he 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 whitewash 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 postman went ratat-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 stalks. 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 crew 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 glinty hill. He went in his ice-boned boots like a man on fishmonger's slabs. He wagged his bagged 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 sloughs. Zebra scarves of a substance like silky gum that could be tug-a-worned down to the galoshes, blinding tamashantas like patchwork teak hoses and bunny suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of head-shinking tribes. From aunts who always wore wool next to the skin,

there were mustached and rasping vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all. And once I had a little prosciated nosebag from an aunt now, alas, no longer are whinnying with us. And picturesque books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not to, wood 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 mini-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 celluloy 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 colour I please, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow build and pea-green, birds hard-boiled toffee fudge and all sorts crunches cracknel humbugs glasses mazipan 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-bushed cheeks, all albinos, huddled their stiff black jarring feathers against the irreligious snow. Mistletoe hung from the gas brackets in all the front parlors. There was cherry and walnuts and bottled beer and crackers by the dessert spoons, and cats in their furabouts watched the fires, and the high-heaped fires spat all ready for the chestnuts and the mulling pocus. Some few large men sat in the front parlors 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 arms 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 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 two hail young men with big pipes blazing, 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 slap-dashing home the gravy smell of the dinners of others the bird smell the brandy the pudding and mince 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 that cheek bulged with goose would press against their tinselled 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. Mother's aunts and sisters scuttled to and fro bearing two wreaths, aunt bare to reans, aunt bare

who had already been frightened twice by a clockwork mouse whimpered at the sideboard and had some elderberry wine. The dog was sick. Auntie Dersie had to have three aspirins, but Auntie Hannah, who liked port, stood in the middle of the snow-bound backyard, singing like a big bosomed thrush. I would blow up balloons to see how big they would blow up to, and then when they burst, which they all did, they all did, the uncles 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 sea-going dram girl. 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 there have been hippos. What did you do if we 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? I'm 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. Or we walked on the white shore. Can the fishes see it snowing? The silent one clouded heavens drifted onto the sea.

Now we were snowblind travelers lost them on the sea. north hills and vast, du-laped dogs with flasks around their necks, ambled and shambled up to us, baying Excelsior. We returned home through the poor streets, where in their few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheel-rutted snow, and cat called after us. Their voices fading away as we trudged up hill into the cries of the dark 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 center 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 of 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. We reach the black bulk of the house. What shall we give them? Hark the herald? No, Jack said. Good King Winsless. I'll count three.

One, two, three. And we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness run the house that was occupied by no-belled. we knew. We stood close together near the dark door. Wood King Winsler's 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 egg-shell 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.

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 and 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.