The Mysterious Origins of the World’s Most Famous Christmas Poem

More than 200 years after “A Visit from St. Nicholas” was published in New York’s Troy Sentinel, we still don’t know who really wrote it.

When it first appeared in the newspaper on December 23, 1823, there was no author attached. It wasn't until 13 years later that Clement Clarke Moore, a professor at New York City’s General Theological Seminary, was named as the poet. A story emerged that a housekeeper, without Moore’s knowledge, had sent the piece—which he had written for his kids—to the newspaper, and in 1844, the poem was officially included in an anthology of Moore’s work.

The problem? The family of the poet Henry Livingston, Jr., claimed their father had been reciting “A Visit From St. Nicholas” to them for 15 years before it was published. Here's the view from both sides.

The Livingston Case
The Moore Case

The Livingston Case

Henry Beekman Livingston’s Dutch ancestry is a key component in this mystery. His mother’s family was Dutch, and many references in the poem are as well. For example, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” gave the now-familiar names to Santa’s reindeer—there seems to be no reference to their names prior to the poem. A couple of the names have changed slightly over the years; instead of Donner and Blitzen, the final two reindeer were called Dunder and Blixem, Dutch for “thunder” and “lightning.” (In modern Dutch the words are spelled donder and bliksem).

According to this hypothesis, Blixem became Blixen to better rhyme with Vixen, and then, in 1844, Moore changed it to the German-esque Blitzen (the actual German word for “lightning” is blitz). Dunder morphed into Donder and then, in the early 20th century, to Donner (German for ”thunder”). Moore’s proponents suggest that the original editor of the poem may have altered the names to better fit a pseudo-Dutch framework, and that Moore simply changed them back to the original German spellings.

Another piece of evidence against Moore’s authorship is that at least four of Livingston’s children and even a young neighbor said they remembered Livingston telling them the tale of St. Nick as early as 1807. They even produced a dated, handwritten copy of the original poem with revisions and scratch marks throughout. Unfortunately, the house containing the manuscript burned down, taking the Livingston family’s proof with it.

When a professor from Vassar College analyzed poetry by both authors, he declared that there was virtually no way Moore could have written “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” The professor alleged the style of the Christmas favorite was completely different, both structurally and in content, from anything else Moore had ever written. But the anapestic meter—a style of verse that stresses every third syllable—of the poem matched up with Livingston’s other work perfectly.

In 2016, former University of Auckland professor MacDonald P. Jackson applied complex statistical analysis to works by both authors. He found that “if we did not know whether the poems in Moore’s manuscript notebook were by him or by Livingston, our full range of tests would, in combination, categorize every one of them as much more probably Moore’s. In this they contrast sharply with ‘The Night Before Christmas,’ which is consistently associated more closely with Livingston.”

The Moore camp often argues that these studies are constructed in ways that discount Moore, especially through ignoring his poems like “The Pig & The Rooster,” which has an anapestic meter.

The Moore Case

Aside from the fact that Moore stepped forward to take credit for the poem, another clue that may point to his authorship is his friendliness with the writer Washington Irving.

In Irving’s A History of New York, he referred to St. Nick as “riding over the tops of the trees in that self-same wagon wherein he brings his yearly presents to children.” And, “when St. Nicholas had smoked his pipe, he twisted it in his hatband, and laying his finger beside his nose,” he got in his wagon and disappeared.

Familiar, right? Moore’s relationship with Irving—author of Rip Van Winkle and the creator of the literary character Diedrich Knickerbocker, among other cultural contributions—may help explain some of the Dutch references in the poem.

To this day, however, it’s one family’s word against the other’s. Clement Clarke Moore usually gets the credit for the Christmas classic, and it will likely remain that way unless Livingston’s descendants can prove otherwise.

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A version of this story originally ran in 2012; it has been updated for 2024.