Today is Tuesday, July 15th, 2014 and there remains just 163 days until Christmas.
Today is Clement Clarke Moore Day. Moore was the author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas“, or, as many know it, “Twas the Night Before Christmas“.
Long before Dicken’s A Christmas Carol and Berlin’s White Christmas the first truly viral cultural phenomenon of Christmas was Moore’s classic poem. Written in the early 1820s the poem was never intended for anyone other than his children. Moore, a religious and educated man, supposedly wrote the poem while delivering Christmas turkeys to the poor on a snowy Christmas Eve. The poem somehow ended up anonymously published in the Troy, New York Sentinel in 1823…and the rest is history.
Picked up every holiday season by hundreds of newspapers nation-wide for years before Dickens hit the scene the poem not only helped to establish the popularity of Christmas in America it forever redefined the physical attributes of Santa Claus. In the nearly 200 years of annual re-publishing of the poem and countless interpretations of it in song, literature, stage and screen it is as close to Christmas scripture as anything comes.
The legend of the poem has led to controversy as some say Moore never wrote it at all but, rather, plagiarized it from Major Henry Livingston, a distant relative of Moore’s wife and a writer whose style was more closely associated with the theme and cadence of A Visit from St. Nicholas. Researchers and historians have debated authorship for decades and, like the controversy over the origins over Jingle Bells, this is a Christmas controversy and mystery that may never be 100% satisfied. Moore’s status as a Christmas legend, however, is secure. The cultural world considers him the author and Christmas celebrants all over love the poem that bears his signature.
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