Christmas Eve in the Valleys

 'Christmas Eve' by R.S. Turner, music by Manic Street Preachers (2021)

 

 It's Christmas Eve in the Monkey House, usually a time of slightly frazzled repose before the perpetual motion machine that is Christmas Morning to Christmas Lunch to Christmas Afternoon (brief pause for the King's Message) and then the likely-to-be-barbequed Christmas Dinner. It's a hectic time, the most ex-haust-ing time of the year, in fact. Christmas Day is the main event; the night before barely gets a word in, much less in songs (unless you happen to be in a New York drunk tank, of course)

 So spare a thought for this liminal pause, then. The moment of quiet betwixt the end of the Shouting Boxing Day Sale reminders of TV and the internets, and the blinking awakening of The Day in Question. To my mind, the commercialism has dominated Christmas Eve - one last, frantic exhortation of the nation's retailers to us to fill the tills emptied months before in anticipation, and reward the faith months of loss-leading have born witness to.

Bah, humbug.

And so to noted poetic Grinch, R.S Thomas, whose The Furies was once quoted in the liner notes to fellow countrymen Manic Street Preachers'; melancholic, none-more-Welsh peak This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours. In the same work Thomas dedicates four short poems to the winter holiday, and it's this one, Christmas Eve, a contemplation of the commercialism of the season with the coming of 'the child' triumphant and soundless, 'like radiation' - brief and full of mystery.

The music works, provided as usual by twin composers James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore, who likely provides the trumpet for this piece. This is not a release proper, but is just a year old, a contribution to Michael Sheen's Christmas Day show for Radio Wales. I like it a lot, and I hope you do, too.

More Manic, more Christmas - tomorrow.