Of all the modern holiday classics, this is perhaps the best known and best loved. In humorous, sonorous, nostalgic prose, Dylan Thomas recalls the church-going, the tree-trimming, the food, the carols and games, not of one childhood Christmas but of them all: he distills here the Perfect Dream of Christmas. In the author's vision of his childhood Christmases in Wales, boys chase each other through the snow; uncles repair to the drawing room lighting pipes; aunts offer Useless Presents such as mufflers long enough to swing from, and my favorite - the Prothero family's house starts to go on fire, which the gaggle of boys attempts to extinguish with snowballs.

Scaring sleeping uncles by popping balloons. Getting a hatchet by mistake. Snowballing cats. Dylan Thomas has captured the perfect Christmas. Without any moral, very little plot, and a concern only for the child's perspective, this little book is better than many other Christmas stories. "A Child's Christmas in Wales" is everything Christmas should be: funny, happy, poignant, a little sad, and fattening.

For the second edition (July 29, 2016), the immortal Edward Ardizzone produced 30 delightful watercolors and drawings (and if you're clever you can recognize Cardiff as the Welsh town in which the story is set) as a perfect counterpoint to Thomas's lilting words. According to one critic, "It's the sheer acrobatic brilliance of the language here that we most love. This is the most delicious read-aloud for having words trip off the tongue."