Story 12 of 12 · United States of America · 1823
A Visit from St. Nicholas
Who it suits: Every age, and made for reading aloud on Christmas Eve.
“’Twas the night before Christmas” is the opening of the poem that gave the world much of its picture of Santa Claus: the sleigh, the eight reindeer, the chimney and the stockings. It was first printed, without its author’s name, in the Troy Sentinel, a newspaper in the state of New York, on 23 December 1823.
The poem is attributed to Clement Clarke Moore, born in 1779, a professor of Oriental and Greek literature at the General Theological Seminary in New York City, who said that he had written it for his own children. He included it in a book of his poems in 1844. The family of another New York poet, Henry Livingston Jr. (1746–1828), later said that Livingston had written it, and the question is still discussed by scholars.
The poem draws on the Dutch Sinterklaas, whom New Yorkers took up in the early 1800s, and on the life of Saint Nicholas, a bishop of Myra, in what is now Turkey, in the fourth century, who was remembered for his secret gifts to families in need. Moore’s St. Nicholas is no longer a bishop but a cheerful, round figure who comes down the chimney and leaves without a word.
The text printed here is the one Moore published in 1844.
In the book, A Visit from St. Nicholas is printed in full with six notes beside the words they explain, its map, its city view and its illustration.
