Thomas Nast's St. Nick illustration 30 years after the poem first appeared |
Note—It looks like this blog will hit a lot of
the literary works that created Christmas as we know it this year . We may as well add the poem that made up St.
Nicholas, a/k/a Santa Claus.
On December 23,
1823 the Troy, New York Sentinel anonymously published a
poem under the title of A Visit from St. Nicholas. In fifty six lines the poem essentially
created Santa Claus a/k/a St. Nick as we know him today—a magical
being who flies on Christmas Eve in
a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer, enters a home via the
chimney, delivers toys to children from his bag, and flies away wishing “Happy
Christmas to all, and to all a goodnight!”
Details of St. Nicholas’s exact appearance would be worked out by
illustrators including Thomas Nast, Norman Rockwell, and Haddon Sundblom over the next century or so and much back story and
elaborations, such as a North Pole workshop and elves would be
added. But essentially Santa was born
with that poem.
In the custom of the day, other
newspapers picked up and reprinted the poem.
Within five years it had become something of a Yule tide staple
in newsprint and other writers began to pick up on this new version of St.
Nicholas. He first took root as a
tradition in many household in New York, Moore’s home state and the home of
many Dutch descendents who easily embraced the transition from their
traditional Sinterklass.
Twenty-one years later, Clement
Clark Moore, a very serious and high minded professor of Oriental and
Greek Literature at Columbia College, finally publicly claimed
authorship when, at the insistence of his now grown children, reluctantly
allowed the poem to be included in an published collection of his more serious
poetic efforts.
Born on Manhattan in
1779 to a Patriot family in still British occupied New York,
Moore was raised devout Episcopalian, Federalist, and
conservative. Both his wife’s and his
own families were slave holders as long as it was legal in the state and
he remained an outspoken anti-abolitionist his whole life. He also objected to paying taxes for urban
improvements like streets and sanitary drainage. He opposed the extension of the voting
franchise beyond wealthy landowners and abhorred the urban poor and the “devil
of Democracy.”
Moore’s estate, Chelsea,
lay outside of the developed city. It was that stately house that Moore
envisioned in his poem. Moore’s wife, Catharine Elizabeth Taylor was a descendent of the Van
Cortlandt family, Dutch patroons,
once the major landholders in the lower Hudson
Valley. After years of fighting, often successfully, the encroachment of
the city, Moore began to develop the estate himself in the 1850’s. He subdivided part for posh brownstones for the city’s elite and deeded
his orchard to the General Theological
Seminary where he also was for many years a professor of Biblical Learning. The Seminary stands today the neighborhood of
Chelsea, all on Moore’s original estate.
Whatever Moore’s political and religious beliefs,
he was a doting and devoted father to several children. He may have been regaling them with stories
of St. Nicholas for sometime. A letter
thought to have been written as early as 1820 mentioned the Christmas
visitor. He clearly was familiar with the
Dutch traditions through his wife and through his close friend, Washington Irving, who had included
Sinterklaas tales in his A History of
New York written in 1809 under the nom de plume of Dietrich Knickerbocker.
But Moore altered Irving’s version in important
ways. Most obviously, he changed
Irving’s horse drawn flying wagon to the reindeer propelled sleigh. He also changed the time of the visit from
Christmas day to Christmas Eve. This was
not accidental. Although the celebration
of Christmas was growing in popularity, many Protestants still resisted the holiday because of its
identification with the Catholic
mass. By moving St. Nick’s visit to
Christmas Eve, which is not a Catholic Holy
Day, Moore made it acceptable.
By the time Moore died at his summer home in Newport, Rhode Island in 1863, his poem
was published in many editions, some of which changed the title to The
Night Before Christmas after the poem’s famous first line. Many editions made other minor changes, most
notably the names of one pair of the reindeer.
Moore’s original Dutch Dunder
and Blixem (Thunder and Lightning in
English) morphed into the German Donder and Blitzen. Still later, others
versions dropped the “d” from Donder. As
Merry Christmas became the standard
holiday greeting it that phrase was often substituted for Happy Christmas in
the poem’s last lines.
Because Moore staked his claim of authorship years
after the first appearance, literary conspiracy
theorists have made a cottage industry of yelling fraud and proposing other
authors. The most frequently cited
candidate is Henry Livingston, a
twig on the family tree of the wealthy and powerful Livingston family who was a
Dutch Reform minister and minor poet
from Poughkeepsie. His descendants claim to have seen a
manuscript of the poem in Henry’s hand which, conveniently, was destroyed in a
fire. But Livingston has his proponents
and a mock trial was held at the Rensselaer
County Courthouse in Troy on December 18.
High priced legal talent strutted their stuff and the result was a hung
jury.
Most literary experts are not as gullible as at
least some members of the moot trial jury.
I’m no expert, but I will stand with Moore as the genuine author.
Hardly a year goes by without at least one new
illustrated edition of the classic poem, which has been called, “…the
best-known verses ever written by an American.”
It has also inspired numerous musical adaptations, stage plays, live
action and animated films, and T.V. shows.
And, inevitably, it has been endlessly parodied.
But the poem lives on because many families still
make it an annual tradition to read on every Christmas Eve the poem Clement
Clark Moore more was embarrassed to admit he wrote.
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