"All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea..." (--Dylan Thomas)

In a Christmas post from another year, I mentioned my mom's love for Dylan Thomas' famous work, "A Child's Christmas in Wales." 

Every Christmas, I read it again: the language is so rich, and it always reminds me of conversations with her.   It also calls to mind my own childhood, listening to my extremely loquacious Scottish grandmother's elaborate stories.   So here are a few lines from it for my mom.  I know she'd be smiling:

"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-colored snow, I could see the lights of 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."