December 23
A VISIT FROM ST. NICHOLAS DAY
“He had a broad face and a little round belly, that shook when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.” There’s hardly a soul alive who couldn’t identify this as the description of Santa Claus. These words were published for the first time on this day in 1823 in the Troy (N.Y.) Sentinel (now the Record). The poem we know as The Night Before Christmas or A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement C. Moore, was published anonymously under the newspaper editor’s title, Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas.
Moore’s poem, which he had written on Christmas Eve one year earlier, took a circuitous route to the Troy paper. The story has it that Moore penned the poem, inspired by the bells on the sleigh in which he was riding, the sleigh’s jolly driver, and the new fallen snow on the streets of New York City, as he was running a last minute errand for his wife. That evening, he read his now-famous words to his six children as they sat in front of their fireplace where “The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in hope that St. Nicholas soon would be there.” The children were so delighted with their father’s images of “a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer,” that they saved the poem, showing it to a family friend, Harriet Butler, who was visiting from Troy. Moore allowed Miss Butler to copy the poem in her keepsake album.
Miss Butler was so taken with the charming work that she sent it in to the Troy newspaper shortly before the following Christmas, unbeknownst to Moore, who never intended to publish the poem as it was out of character for a strait-laced professor of classics.
The poem captured the imaginations of young and old alike … indeed, its popularity can be measured by the many editions still in print … so Clement C. Moore finally consented to being recognized as its author when the poem appeared in The New-York Book of Poetry in 1837.
Some say Moore took his inspiration from his past readings of the Knickerbocker History and The Children’s Friend, borrowing a little here and a little there. Others say that since he wasn’t writing for publication, but for his own children, they can believe that the author of A Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language, a linguist and an elite Episcopalian could also write: “More rapid than eagles his coursers they came, and he whistled and shouted and called them by name; Now, Dasher! Now, Dancer! Now Prancer and Vixen! On Comet! On Cupid! On Donner and Blitzen!”
We believe! We believe! We “ … heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight, Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night!.”
Those Were the Days, the Today in History service from 440 International
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