“In thousands of homes and by hundreds of thousands of children these words will soon be repeated: ‘’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house / Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.’”
So began a 1912 article in The New York Times, which went on to give a thumbnail history of “A Visit From St. Nicholas” — usually referred to these days as “The Night Before Christmas” — and a biography of Clement C. Moore, the scholar who wrote it for his daughters in 1822 at “his father’s imposing tree-shaded country house in old Chelsea Village, at the corner of what is now 23rd Street and Ninth Avenue.” The poem, the paper would later assert, “finally put Santa Claus’s Dutch origin out of mind in America.”
“A Visit From St. Nicholas” first appeared in The Times’s pages in 1896, in a special holiday supplement. The paper would go on to print it on and off for years, and in 1918, it even reproduced a “photographic copy” of the first page of the poem as it appeared at the New-York Historical Society (now the New York Historical) in Moore’s own handwriting.
This isn’t the original manuscript, but one that Moore wrote specifically for the Historical Society archives in 1862. It is also the version that is used to defend Moore’s oft-contested authorship. It was sent to the Historical Society’s librarian by one T.W.C. Moore (apparently unrelated), who wrote in an accompanying letter, “In an interview I had yesterday with Dr. Moore, he told me that a portly, rubicund Dutchman living in the neighborhood of his father’s country seat, Chelsea, suggested to him the idea of making St. Nicholas the hero of this ‘Christmas piece’ for his children.”
It’s safe to say that the poem is as popular today as it was 125 years ago, when the Book Review editors wrote about it in a short note to readers: “The human heart beats in it, the true Christmas spirit pervades it, and it will be dear to the heart of childhood as long as children continue to hang their stockings on Christmas Eve — and may that beautiful custom never die out!”
The post The Times’s Special History With ‘The Night Before Christmas’ appeared first on New York Times.
