On December 23 the Troy, New York, Sentinel published an unsigned poem under the heading “Account of a Visit From St. Nicholas.” A prefatory editor’s note confessed, “We know not to whom we are indebted for the following. …” The poem, better known today as “The Night Before Christmas,” was an instant hit, and the Sentinel , along with other newspapers, began reprinting it every Christmas. In January 1829, responding to a query about who wrote the poem, the Sentinel described its author as “a gentleman of more merit as a scholar and a writer than many more of more noisy pretensions.” For those who were stumped by the Sentinel ’s word games, an 1837 anthology finally identified the poet, an affluent New York City landowner and classical scholar named Clement Clarke Moore.

Moore made an unlikely composer of doggerel. His previously published works included America’s first Hebrew lexicon, a refutation of Thomas Jefferson’s religious views, an inquiry into America’s foreign shipping trade, and a translation from the French of Alexandre Henri Tessier’s A Complete Treatise on Merinos and Other Sheep . Moore wrote most of “A Visit From St. Nicholas” while shopping for a turkey on Christmas Eve 1822. He committed it to paper when he got home and then recited it to his family. A houseguest, Harriet Butler, of Troy, asked permission to copy the poem, and the next Christmas it appeared in her hometown paper.

Moore’s poem added several important features to the traditional St. Nicholas legend, a centuries-old accretion of religious stories and pagan myths. In 1809 Washington Irving had introduced the idea of a benevolent gift-bearing St. Nicholas flying through the air in a wagon. An 1821 children’s book published by a friend of Moore had pictured “Santeclaus” in a flying sleigh pulled by a single reindeer. Moore increased the number of deer to eight (which is much more plausible) and gave them names. He also introduced Santa’s familiar ruddy cheeks, red nose, white beard, and large belly, modeling his features after those of an old Dutchman who lived nearby.

In Moore’s version the reindeer flew only when they needed to get up to the roof; otherwise they pulled the sleigh along the ground. Bright children may have wondered why St. Nicholas didn’t just use the door, though the brightest ones surely realized that grown-ups do many things that don’t make sense. In any case Santa’s unnecessarily dramatic mode of entry required him to be the size of an elf, which accounts for the poem’s “miniature sleigh” and “tiny reindeer.” Indeed, most nineteenth-century illustrators drew a doll-size Santa Claus until the jumbo, roly-poly Thomas Nast version began to take shape in the 1860s. How such a runt could carry gifts much larger than a Cracker Jack prize was never explained, but here again, sharp children were wise enough