Dear Friends,

I wanted to give you something for Christmas. Something free and different.

Yes, yes. I know that everything on this website is free (okay, well, if you click the links to my books you’ll see that the books aren’t free). And the Advent readings are certainly free. But they aren’t different.

Okay, maybe they are different. I don’t know.

I’m starting over.

Dear Friends,

I have a Christmas present for you. And this is for you even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, don’t get Christmas, or even if you are a Bah Humbug kind of person.

I hope you’re not. But still.

This is a Christmas present for everyone: adult and child alike, solitary or in company, at home or away. It’s for anyone who likes words and even for people who don’t realize they do (one of my not-so-secret aims is to show you that you do like words, that you actually love them–did you know?). It’s a gift of something simple, brief, and lovely. Something you can enjoy once or again. Something that will make you think and imagine or that you can turn your mind off to and just let the words come– as they will, as they want to.

(Well-aligned words are Such Lovely Things, don’t you think so?)

Here’s the gift: I’ve read aloud and recorded something Favorite of mine, and I’m inviting you to listen.

What is it? It’s a short story. No. A poem. No. A Memory and a Conversation, a look over the shoulder, a Christmas or ten of them heaped up and then unspooled in a glorious line of words.

It’s Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

Who is Dylan Thomas? Dylan Thomas was a Welshman and a poet. He lived a short, loud and inebriated life, and he loved Christmas. He loved his memories of Christmas, anyway–the Christmases he had known when he was a child in (you guessed it) Wales.

He wrote A Child’s Christmas in Wales, and the work is certainly a testament to his love for and fond memory of his childhood Christmases. Well, whether or not he actually loved these memories is, I suppose, up to question, as he died in 1953. We cannot ask him. But this bit of prose certainly suggests that he loved those Christmases Past and snow and Wales in the snow.

Any work of literature mustered up in love is worth something, isn’t it? Add to that Thomas’s adjectives, his specificity, his brilliant and tempered use of alliteration; include his evocation of the child-mind, so richly done in this text; his appreciation of postmen; his love of mystery; his brilliant description of uncles (“there are always uncles at Christmas”) and aunts.

It’s so so good.

And it might be difficult to follow. So allow me to explain that this is a memory, and memories come as they will, right? Often memories lead to other memories in ways that make sense to our minds at the time but that, written out, might be confusing to the one who is following along.

Know that this is what is happening here: someone is remembering his childhood Christmases, and he is doing so in the aggregate: all-in-a-heap. One thought of Christmas past leads to another, and just when you are really and truly settling in to this stream-of-consciousness, you realize that he is now relating these Christmases to someone else–likely a child.

In fact, the way that this narrative becomes a conversation makes one wonder if Thomas is himself one of the uncles he mentions who has been dozing (and remembering) in front of a Christmas fire, and then has been interrupted by a niece or nephew and so begins telling them what he has been reliving in his mind.

It’s wonderful.

And, as I said, it’s for everyone. For people who began their holiday celebrations last night with Hanukah. For people who have never heard of Christmas. For people who celebrate Christmas in the summertime, never with snow. It’s for you and your children, for your baby who can barely crawl. For your great-aunt who might even now be “teetering at the sideboard.” For the uncles who are on their way to your house for the holidays.

Why is it for everyone? Because it’s beautiful–and beauty is for Everyone, most especially at Christmas.

So where is it? See below. Download and enjoy.

Merry Christmas!

With Great Joy,

Rebecca

click here to download

The post A Merry Christmas Gift for You: A Child’s Christmas in Wales appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Naturally, I thought of words.

“Effusion,” I thought to myself. “This is an ‘effusion’ of light.” The stand of trees just east of my house was cast in the beginnings of day. The yet invisible sun had brought the light up, so to speak, in the way the lights come up in a theater at intermission or with a dimmer switch in one’s dining room. It wasn’t bright outside; it wasn’t sunny. It was a filling of light.

But “effuse” and “effusion” were not the words I was looking for. I know, because I checked in with Merriam-Webster, that powerhouse of all things Words. And I discovered, in the fog of my morning brain or my (recently) traveling-too-much brain, or in my all-of-the-marketing-and-none-of-the-writing brain, that I was wrong.

To “effuse” does indeed mean “to flow out,” and the growing light to the east was a kind of flowing, I suppose. The light filled the spaces between the black tree trunks as in so much pouring, which is a definition of “effuse” (“to pour out, as a liquid”).

But it wasn’t quite right.

Why? Because “effuse” and “effusion” are more than this. They are words marked by more— as in Too Much. See Merriam-Webster’s second definition: “to make a great or excessive display of enthusiasm.”

It’s the “excessive” bit here that misfits. And if that seems untrue, we must check the synonyms for “effuse,” which are as follows: gush, fuss, rave, rhapsodize. And the best of them: drool, slobber.

I know, I know. These words are synonyms for the second definition, that “excessive display of enthusiasm.” But we can get the gist of a word more fully when we consider those second (and third) definitions. And certainly we all know what it’s like when one gushes one’s enthusiasm, when one raves. Is that a right sense of “effusion” for the beginnings of a sunrise? For the beginning of my sunrise, today? “Effuse,” “effusive,” “effusion”: these are words leaning beyond abundance, toward excess. Toward– if you will– muchness.

What we had outside my window at 7 AM wasn’t excessive in the slightest. It was quieter than that.

By 7:30, a glow had begun, the gray giving way to something warmer. The sun was certainly now visible somewhere along the horizon, but not yet through my stand of trees. What I had instead was a lifting fog tinged in yellow, and blackened trunks easing toward gray. Light slipping into spaces that, only moments ago, were dark.

“Diffusion,” I thought to myself. That was the word. “Diffuse,” “diffusion.” And naturally I returned to Merriam-Webster, because I like to go there whenever the smallest need suggests itself.

The word seemed, at first, to work: “spread out over a large space, not concentrated.”

What we had outside my window was decidedly spread out. It was everywhere, in fact. The light that moments before was only a gray cast in the sky was now touching everything. The leaves, still patiently hanging on even in the latter half of November, were beginning to show their colors: yellow, pale green, copper and rust.

I considered again my word: “diffuse,” and decided to look at the secondary definitions.

“Diffuse: being at once verbose and ill-organized; not concentrated or localized.”

No, this wasn’t the right word at all. Because while the growing light was decidedly circuitous (a synonym of “diffuse” and perhaps here expressing the light’s capacity for movement around and between the trunks and slender articulations of branch, stem, and leaf), it was certainly not rambling, not long-winded, if you will. Not wandering into logorrhea (“excessive and often incoherent wordiness”), which is specifically a word about speech and words but which implies a lack of focus or organization. Inattention to detail.

What we had outside my window was specific. It was coming on with what could be called deliberation. And it was very attentive to detail.

The sun itself was now coming through in hazy lines through the trees, landing here and there on trunks and leaves. Sometimes it held a cluster of leaves hanging in the sunlight, their colors glowing while around them the woods were in shadow. And sometimes it was a single leaf fully imbued with light as if set on fire. For awhile, a solitary maple leaf close to me was incandescent. It was bright yellow in the sun, and its stem–attached almost invisibly to its shadowed branch–shone red.

This was when I gave up consulting the dictionary. I stood at the window and watched the light call things to life, as with its many hands it moved through the trees, a mother tenderly waking her children into the day.

The right word, of course, is “suffuse,” something you and Merriam-Webster could have told me, no doubt, at the very beginning of this post. To suffuse is to “spread over or fill,” and so it was with the light through the little woods in my backyard. This morning I watched it flush and fill, endue and imbue this small patch of world.

I watched it happen: steep and infuse. “As with a liquid,” says Merriam-Webster. Or “as with joy,” I say.

As with life.

The post November Morning appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.