On December 23, 1822, a poem entitled A Visit from St. Nicholas, was published in the Troy, New York Sentinel paper, and would cement the most basic aspects of our American Christmas tradition. At this point in time, Christmas in America was a purely religious affair with no tree or special decor. New Years Day was the big winter holiday, but some were trying to introduce another winter festival to the calendar and had tried for St. Nicholas’ day on December 6, while others proposed the introduction of more celebration on Christmas day. This was met with opposition from Catholics who wanted to keep Christmas firmly focused on the birth of christ, but Clement Clarke Moore, a Professor and Scholar in New York City would inadvertently settle the debate with his poem that captured the imaginations of a people and transformed Christmas into the holiday we know today.
Moore didn’t set out to write a popular poem. He wrote the verses, which began with the now ubiquitous “Twas the night before Christmas…” for his children, and it was a friend of his who submitted it to the upstate New York paper. The themes within, including the idea that St. Nicholas would bring children presents by landing on rooftops and climbing down chimneys, were borrowed from old Dutch lore of a man named Sancte Claus who would ride around in his wagon distributing presents to children. Moore did, however, introduce many of the elements now central to the character of Santa Claus like his sleigh drawn by eight reindeer and his jolly demeanor and expansive belly. Other things Moore introduced, like the fact that St. Nicholas and his reindeer were supposed to be “miniature,” and elf sized, didn’t remain in the narrative.
The reception to the poem was overwhelmingly positive. Burrows and Wallace in Gotham state that New Yorkers embraced the story and the new tradition of Christmas almost immediately “as if they had been celebrating it their whole lives.” Within a decade the poem was famous across the nation and Christmas was a step closer to the holiday we know today. One of the key aspects of the transformation was the important point that St. Nicholas, or Santa Claus, didn’t visit homes on Christmas Day, but instead came silently the night before, not corrupting the sanctity of the day itself. Catholics were free to join in the revelry, and the traditions blossomed from there.
The character of Santa Claus, or St. Nicholas, still had much growing to do. Moore had established his general demeanor as a jolly elf - something he’d borrowed from an earlier Washington Irving work - but the appearance of Santa as a full grown, big bearded man would come from illustrator Thomas Nast in the second half of the 19th century. Santa Claus and the modern Christmas tradition is one that has been added to, twisted around, and cobbled together over the past few centuries, but no single contribution did more to establish the tradition as we know it today more that the impossibly famous A Visit from St. Nicholas.