On December twenty-third, 1823, a small newspaper in upstate New York called the Troy Sentinel printed an anonymous fifty-six-line poem titled Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas. Opening with the immortal line “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house,” this single piece of verse single-handedly invented the modern American conception of Santa Claus: transforming a stern European bishop into a jolly, pipe-smoking elf who flies across the rooftops in a miniature sleigh pulled by eight named reindeer to slide down chimneys with a sack of toys. For nearly two centuries, official literary credit has belonged to the distinguished New York biblical scholar Clement Clarke Moore; yet compelling forensic, historical, and stylometric evidence has sparked a fierce debate suggesting the poem was actually written fifteen years earlier by a carefree Dutchess County major named Henry Livingston Jr.
The Traditional Story of Clement Clarke Moore
According to the widely accepted account, Clement Clarke Moore—a wealthy forty-three-year-old professor of Oriental and Greek Literature at the General Theological Seminary in Manhattan and the developer of the Chelsea neighborhood—composed the poem on a snowy afternoon on December twenty-fourth, 1822. Returning home in a sleigh after buying a Christmas turkey at Washington Market to delight his six young children, including his six-year-old daughter Charity who was recovering from an illness, Moore reportedly modeled the appearance of Saint Nicholas on a cheerful, heavyset Dutch handyman named Jan Duyckinck who worked on his estate.
Because Moore was a serious, dignified academic who had compiled a massive two-volume Hebrew lexicon and viewed light children’s rhymes as beneath his scholarly dignity, the story states that he read the poem privately in his parlor and forbade its publication. However, a houseguest visiting from Troy, New York—Miss Harriet Butler, the daughter of an Episcopal rector—copied the verses into her album and secretly handed them a year later to Orville Holley, the editor of the Troy Sentinel, who published it without an author’s name in December 1823. It was not until 1837 that Moore’s name was first linked to the poem in print, and twenty-one years passed after its debut before Moore finally claimed authorship publicly by including it in his 1844 anthology, Poems.
Major Henry Livingston Jr. and the 1808 Family Testimony
When Clement Clarke Moore’s 1844 poetry collection began circulating across New York, the adult children and grandchildren of Major Henry Livingston Jr. of Locust Grove in Poughkeepsie, New York, were stunned. Born in 1748 into the prominent Livingston family—and technically a distant relative of Moore’s wife by marriage—Henry Livingston was a Revolutionary War veteran, surveyor, justice of the peace, and prolific amateur poet who had died in 1828 without ever knowing that his favorite family Christmas rhyme had become famous under another man’s name.
In sworn family letters and affidavits gathered during the nineteenth century, four of Livingston’s children—along with a neighbor who worked as a governess at Locust Grove—independently testified that back in December 1807 or 1808, their father had emerged from his study holding a handwritten sheet of ink-stained paper and read “Twas the night before Christmas” aloud to the family around the fireplace. Livingston’s son, Charles, recalled hanging the original manuscript inside his mother’s sewing table before the house burned down in Michigan years later, and noted that Harriet Butler, the young woman who supposedly carried the poem from Moore’s house to the Troy newspaper, had also lived right next door to the Livingstons in Poughkeepsie as a family friend.
Anapestic Meter, Dutch Reindeer Names, and Stylometric Clues
In 2000, Donald Foster, a Vassar College English professor famous for using linguistic forensics to unmask the anonymous author of the political novel Primary Colors and help identify the Unabomber’s manifesto, published a landmark investigation in his book Author Unknown that tipped the scales heavily toward Henry Livingston Jr. When Foster compared every single surviving poem written by Clement Clarke Moore against the surviving notebooks of Henry Livingston, the stylistic contrast was night and day.
First, the Night Before Christmas is written in galloping anapestic meter (da-da-DUM, da-da-DUM). Across dozens of surviving poems published in eighteenth-century New York magazines, anapestic meter was Henry Livingston’s absolute favorite rhythm; he wrote in it effortlessly and constantly, including an 1789 poem about New Year’s Day featuring flying reindeer sleighs. Clement Clarke Moore, by contrast, almost exclusively wrote ponderous, moralistic poetry in stiff iambic meter, lecturing children about their flaws rather than celebrating merriment. Second, two of the famous reindeer in the 1823 poem were originally named in Dutch—”Dunder and Blixem,” from the Dutch maternal expressions for thunder and lightning. Livingston was three-quarters Dutch, spoke Dutch fluently, and used the exact phrase “Dunder and Blixem” in his other writings; Moore did not speak Dutch and, when copying out the poem in the 1840s, actually altered the names to the Germanized “Donder and Blitzen” because he did not know the original Dutch idiom.
Tobacco Pipes and the Enduring Mystery
Even small character details in the poem contradict Clement Clarke Moore’s personal beliefs while matching Henry Livingston’s life. In the poem, Saint Nicholas clamps the stump of a pipe tight in his teeth while smoke encircles his head like a wreath; in real life, Moore despised tobacco smoke and banned it from his property, whereas Livingston was a convivial social smoker. Furthermore, archival property records showed that in 1822—the exact year Moore later claimed to have written the poem for his daughter—Moore hadn’t yet developed a warm affection for popular seasonal mythology, and statistical computer analyses performed in 2016 by Professor MacDonald Jackson of the University of Auckland analyzing phoneme pairs confirmed a far stronger linguistic match with Livingston than with Moore.
Defenders of Clement Clarke Moore, such as historian Seth Kaller, counter that Moore possessed four handwritten manuscripts of the poem, had the scholarly library in Manhattan where sources mentioning Saint Nicholas and reindeer existed, and had his authorship attested in writing by the Troy Sentinel’s original editor and printer before his death in 1863. Whether penned in a Poughkeepsie farmhouse in 1808 by a joyful Dutch-American major or in a Manhattan townhouse in 1822 by a solemn seminary professor reversing his usual stern style for his children, those fifty-six lines remain the foundational myth of the American holiday season.
