I wanted to tell a story about a ghost for Christmas, but the only story I had to tell started with a Welsh candlesnuffer. This is an object, not a person; there was not a man from St Asaph lurking in a back room somewhere, emerging only to extinguish flames that had burned too long. This was also not a euphemism for something brazen, though I have racked my brain and come up empty vis-a-vis the question of just what it might be a euphemism for.
The Welsh candlesnuffer was a small and hollow object in the shape of an angel which my mother had purchased decades earlier on a work trip to Swansea. Every Christmas it would appear on a side table and remain there throughout the holiday season.
When I was six or seven, I held the Welsh candlesnuffer in my hand and looked it over. The house’s Christmas decorations were a source of constant mystery to me then: the velvet cherub, the cardboard manger, and the driftwood reindeer all beguiled me. I stared at it for a long time until something stopped my thoughts cold. “Mother,” I said. “Does this angel have a mustache?”
She walked over to me and took up the Welsh candlesnuffer. She regarded it from a distance, then up close. “Yes,” she said. “In Wales, all the angels have facial hair.”
Across the room, my father paused as he trimmed the tree. “I’m not so sure about that,” he said.
“Have you been to Wales?” my mother asked. My father replied that he had not. “Well,” she said. “I think my experience in this field outstrips yours.”
My mother handed the Welsh candlesnuffer back to me and I beheld it again. One day, I told myself, I would grow a mustache as magnificent as the one on the face of the angel before me.
Five Christmases later, the family cat destroyed the Wesh candlesnuffer in a fit of pique. Gradually, the face of the mustachioed angel moved from tactile object to something that existed only in the family’s memory, an artifact of a bygone time.
A decade after that, during a semester in London, I boarded a train to Cardiff, my mother’s observation about the angels in Wales still sonorous as it drifted through my mind. I had booked a room in a cheap hostel for a few nights, and I looked forward to getting lost in the city as best I could.
