One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the seatown 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.

This sentence comes from Dylan Thomas’s nostalgic prose piece “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” first written for radio and later published in print. Thomas (1914–1953), a Welsh poet known for musical language and memory-driven narration, evokes an idealized, composite childhood Christmas in a small coastal town. The work is framed as an adult looking back from a distance—“around the seatown corner now”—where individual years blur together into a single remembered season. The opening establishes the piece’s method: not strict autobiography or chronology, but a lyrical reconstruction of childhood sensation, especially the mythic scale of snow, family voices, and ritual.

The line dramatizes how memory works: repeated holidays merge, and the mind preserves not exact facts but the emotional weather of the past. Thomas turns uncertainty (“six days… or… twelve days”) into a poetic truth—childhood experience feels larger than measurement, and time expands in recollection. The “distant speaking… a moment before sleep” suggests that the past returns most vividly in liminal states, when adult life quiets and old voices surface. By beginning with an admission of imperfect recall, Thomas signals that the story will be faithful to feeling rather than documentary accuracy, making nostalgia itself the subject.