With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully. But all that the children could hear was a ringing of bells.
[A Child’s Christmas In Wales, page VI]

Dylan Thomas uses the power of imagination to turn a mailman into a dazzling piece of art, created only with the power of imagination. It is small parts of a book like this that can turn a good book into a great book. Muhammad Ali once said, “The man who has no imagination has no wings.” The power of imagination is what makes this book what is and what it will always be known as.

     Dylan Thomas uses a wide range of sentence techniques to drive us into what he’s really thinking. One of the ways the writer brings us through Thomas’s imaginations is by using lots of metaphors and similes, for example, “Mr. Prothero standing in the middle of them, waving his slipper as though he were conducting.” In this particular instance the reader is looking back on how different it is nowadays compared to when he was a young boy on Christmas. He uses a  metaphor to compare the color of the birds to a flannel shirt. He wrote,

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors.
[A Child’s Christmas In Wales, page V]

Dylan Thomas’s excellent use of similes and metaphors is part of the reason why this short story became such a hit when it first came out. He is able to really set the scene each time he kind of witched between memory’s. If you have a story, whether this topic interest you or not, it’s always more intriguing if the author uses a simile or metaphor that really makes you think. George Orwell once said, “By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.” The use of creative similes and metaphors are what makes this book stand out among the rest.

     Dylan Thomas creates this story from the roots of his Imagination. He uses all sorts of crazy similes and metaphors to bring this story to life. This is what makes a story a story.