We kick off this year’s Holiday Author Blog series with Thrity Umrigar, the bestselling author of such novels as HONOR, which was a Reese's Book Club pick, as well as three picture books and a memoir. Her upcoming novel, MISSING SAM, which releases on January 27th, is the tense and twisty story of a woman who goes missing on a morning run and her wife's determination to both find her and clear her own name. Thrity recalls a book that her friend gave her one snowy Christmas in Ohio. Reading it that night brought up a flood of holiday memories and made her think about all the other special gifts she has received.
It was Christmas. It was Ohio. It was snowing.
But inside my friend’s home --- let’s call her Sharon, although that’s not her real name --- it was warm. A fire blazed in the wood fireplace. Christmas carols played on the stereo. The lights glowed, and the ornaments sparkled on the tall Christmas tree. Her orange tabby purred on the rug in front of us as we sat around the fire.
We had just finished a scrumptious dinner. Sharon’s young son had kept us entertained with his inventive tales. Now, we sat in the glow of full bellies and easy companionship. And not for the first time, I marveled at my good fortune. I had moved to this university town a mere nine months earlier, and already I had become dear friends with Sharon, a fellow writer. I was a journalist back then, but I wrote poems that I didn’t share with anyone, because poetry was where my heart lived and I was too afraid to have that heart crushed. We came from very different backgrounds. I was born in India and had been in America a mere four years, but America was already home, a country that fit me like a glove. Sharon was born and raised here. But we shared the important things --- a love for books, movies and art, and memories of loving but difficult childhoods.
Now it was time to exchange our Christmas gifts. I don’t remember what I got her and her son, but I’m sure it looked like a raccoon had wrapped their gifts. Even cutting gift wrap paper in a straight line was a skill set that eluded me.
Her gift was perfectly wrapped, sharp corners and all. I tore it open to find a slim copy of Dylan Thomas’ A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN WALES. I thanked her. The warmth of the fire was making me drowsy. After all the gifts had been opened, I sank deeper into my armchair and flipped open the book and read.
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and 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.
So begins Thomas’ short story. I was immediately enchanted. The rhythm of the words, the strange cadence echoed like a gong deep in my chest. Suddenly, I couldn’t wait to go home and read the rest.
Wales sounds a lot like Ohio, at least in its description of snow, I thought, as I drove home that night to my one-bedroom apartment, furnished with hand-me-downs from another friend’s parents. That night, snow was coming down like a curtain of silver confetti as my hands gripped the wheel. It looked beautiful and dangerous. I suppose all beauty contains an element of danger.
As I read in bed later that night, the hair on the back of my neck stood up continually. Thomas’ thrilling phrases --- the two-tongued sea, the ice-edged fish-freezing waves--- reminded me of another Dylan, one who I was more familiar with, who wrote of the ancient empty streets and the jingle-jangle morning. Here was language free from constraints, utterly itself and blazingly original.
When Thomas wrote of plunging his hands into metaphoric snows and bringing out whatever memories he could of the Christmases of his childhood, I felt compelled to do the same. But what came up for me were memories of Christmases spent in a tropical city by the sea. Of the nuns, slender and swift as ghosts, decorating the tall tree at my Catholic school. Of the puny plastic Christmas tree at home, which we decorated with tinsel and with cotton balls flattened to look like snow. It was not the snow of Wales, it was not the snow of Ohio, but it pleased my unsuspecting child’s heart.
I read deep into the night. I finished the lovely story and felt its magic work on me. I remembered my first Christmas in my new country --- spent in Georgia, at the home of a college friend. I thought about last year’s Christmas, where another friend, also a journalist, who made the same puny wages that I did, gave me a box set of Bruce Springsteen’s albums. I thought of the wild generosity of that gift. Then I thought of the gift of America, how it had called to me from across the oceans and then welcomed me, folding me into its arms.
Outside, the snow fell and fell. Eventually, I must’ve fallen asleep, the book lying on my chest. I don’t remember. And so I’ll let Dylan Thomas have the last word.
Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored 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, 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.
