Who invented Santa?

And lo, a Christmas revolution was born as Santa Claus swept in from his arctic home, pulled by his reindeer to deposit presents for America’s children. Ever since the poem was first published, anonymously by the Troy Sentinel in New York state in 1823, it has become a defining part of the American Christmas.

Indeed, ’Twas The Night Before Christmas is frequently credited with all but introducing the idea of Santa Claus to the United States. Prior to its popularity, St Nicholas was as likely to be represented as a stern, even forbidding, visitor to children - far removed from the bluff, jovial cove since immortalised, sentimentalised and commercialised by the combined efforts of children’s writers and Madison Avenue advertising executives.

If the British Christmas - or the idea of the traditional British Christmas - is somehow encapsulated by Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol the treacly sentiment that coats The Night Before Christmas has performed an equivalent function in the United States, albeit on a lower literary plane.

Nonetheless, the name of Professor Clement Clarke Moore, the poem’s author, occupies a small, but particular, place in America’s literary pantheon. If it was the Grinch who stole Christmas it was, to exaggerate only slightly, Professor Moore who invented the idea in the first place. In later years Coca-Cola would popularise the image of a jolly red-cloaked Santa Claus, smiling out from countless advertisements, but the idea of Santa had taken root long before then, largely thanks to the popularity of Moore’s poem.

Now, however, the poem’s provenance has been called into question. Moore, it is alleged, has proven himself, unwittingly or not, every bit as larcenous as the Grinch himself, filching another man’s work and passing it off as his own. Descendents of a Scotch-Dutch soldier, Major Henry Livingston, believe their ancestor is the true author of the poem and that his place in the annals of American literature has been usurped by an imposter. Clement Clarke Moore’s descendents are equally adamant that there’s no evidence to suppose their man was not the true author.

The two men could scarcely have been more different. Moore was the descendent of wealthy English Episcopalians, the son of a Bishop and the owner of a Manhattan estate better known today as Chelsea. Livingston, as his name suggests, was partly of Scottish descent and he considered himself a son of Scotland.

Where Moore, who only acknowledged authorship of the poem in 1844 when his collected poems were published, was a high Tory, Livingston, 33 years his senior, was a confirmed Whig who, on the outbreak of the revolutionary war, altered "God Save the King" in his music book to read "God Save the Congress" before marching off to fight for the colonial rebels.

As early as 1788 Livingston was writing that "a land of slaves will ever be a land of poverty, ignorance and idleness" whereas Moore, although suspicious of the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson and the damage the third president’s dangerously democratic ideals were doing to the fledgling republic, remained a staunch supporter of slavery. The two men differed too on the need for and seemliness of women’s education and on how the United States should treat Native Americans. In each of these debates it must be noted that modern tastes side with Livingston, while Moore appears a prisoner of his times - and a prisoner of the more reactionary elements of those times at that. Livingston, to modern sensibilities, the more sympathetic character, then has sentiment on his side.

Although it has long been an article of faith among Livingston’s descendents that the Major wrote the poem, until recently they have failed to produce much in the way of supporting evidence for their claim. That was before they enlisted the help of Don Foster, a professor of English at Vassar College in upstate New York. Foster, an expert in textual analysis, is most famous for unmasking Joe Klein as the anonymous author of Primary Colors.

The idea of settling the dispute over the poem’s authorship appealed to Foster, despite his fears that his academic peers might scoff at him for wasting so much time on such an apparently trivial project. However, as he wrote in Author unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous it seemed worth ending the argument one way or the other since, "By translating Europe’s crotchety old Nicholas into Saint Nick, the merriest saint in Christendom, the author of that little poem caused America finally to open its heart to old Santaclaw, and in a very big way."

It did not take long for Foster’s view of Moore to sour. Moore’s own writing suggests that he had, in large part, a bleak view of the poet’s work that is strikingly at odds with the homely cheerfulness of ’Twas The Night Before Christmas. Poetry, he once wrote, served no purpose "if it possess no other recommendation than the glow of its expressions and the tinkling of its syllables or the wanton allurement of the ideas it conveys." It’s true that this bah humbug school of literary criticism would also account for Moore’s supposed embarrassment over the "trifling" nature of the poem he would become famous for, but it scarcely suggests he was over-stuffed with the Christmas spirit.

Nor do other examples of his work. In 1804 Moore penned An Apology for Not Accepting a young lady’s invitation to a ball, which read in part: "To me ’tis giv’n your virtue to secure/From custom’s force and pleasure’s dangerous lure.../For if, regardless of my friendly voice,/In fashion’s gaudy scenes your heart rejoice/Dire punishments shall fall upon your head:/Disgust and fretfulness, and secret dread,"

And the compliments of the season to you too, sir. As Foster noted drily, "Young Clement Moore speaks often of sin and he lets you know that he’s against it."

Not everyone is convinced by Foster’s analysis however. "I don’t think he spent as much time doing research on this as on some of his other projects," says Nancy H Marshall, author of The Night Before Christmas: A Descriptive Bibliography of Clement Clarke Moore’s Immortal Poem.

Nonetheless, even if Moore was not the author - or if it requires a considerable imaginative stretch to believe him responsible for ’Twas The Night Before Christmas, that is far from the same thing as supposing that Livingston was its author. One of his grand-daughters may have said: "Of course grandfather wrote ’Twas The Night Before Christmas. I believe it just as much as I believe that Robert Burns wrote Tam O’Shanter’’. but his descendents have struggled to produce physical evidence to support their contention. Unhelpfully, Livingston’s poetry book was lost in a fire.

So we are left with hints and suppositions, balancing the respective probability of the rival claims. Tradition may be on Moore’s side, but linguistic evidence of the sort Foster specialises in lends its weight to Livingston.

"There is absolutely nothing in writing that proves Livingston ever wrote the poem, nothing has been found in his papers to support the claim," notes Marshall, which is true as far as it goes; but doesn’t go terribly far.

To take but one example of the kind of textual analysis Foster used to support his pro-Livingston argument, the Professor notes that the author of the poem uses "all" four times as an adverb and five as a pronoun - a ratio consistent with the rest of Livingston’s writing. By contrast, in all of Moore’s writing he uses "all" as a pronoun ten times as often as he employs it as an adverb.

Then there’s the poem’s reference to "all snug" - which Foster believes was derived from the Scottish poet Allan Ramsay’s poem Gentle Shepherd. Ramsay was one of, yes, Livingston’s favourite poets. Furthermore, Livingston’s other poems, many of them written for the Poughkeepsie newspapers under a variety of pseudonyms such as "Henry Hotspur" owe much to 18th century anapestic satires penned by poets such as William King and Christopher Anstey.

It is true that Moore also wrote one poem in a similar style, but the burden of debt to these predecessors is felt more heavily by Livingston than by the New York City professor, argues Foster.

Others disagree, arguing that Foster has misjudged Moore’s writing, failing to realise that many of Moore’s poems were satires while others reflected the concerns of a patrician class threatened by the thirsty desires of the plebeian mob. Nowhere was this more true than in New York City where Christmas had, by the 1820s, all but degenerated into an orgy of drunken violence and theft as gangs of youths knocked on doors demanding to be given gifts and threatening property owners with the direst consequences should they decline to accommodate the revellers’ desires.

Thus, argues, Stephen Nissenbaum, a historian at the University of Massachusetts, resulted in Moore and his class embarking on a "quite serious cultural enterprise: forging a pseudo-Dutch identity for New York, a placid "folk" identity that could provide a cultural counterweight to the commercial bustle and democratic misrule of the early 19th century city." (The best and most enduring example of this enterprise is perhaps Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle.)

’Twas The Night Before Christmas therefore "transformed stern and dignified St Nicholas into a jolly old elf, Santa Claus, a magical figure who brought only gifts, no punishments or threats," argues Nissenbaum. Furthermore "the poem provided a simple and effective ceremony that enabled its readers to restrict the holiday to their own family, and to place at its heart the presentation of gifts to their children - in a profoundly gratifying, ritual alternative to the rowdy street scene that was taking place outside."

Yet, in a sense, it scarcely matters today which claim to authorship is genuine. The poem long ago escaped from the bounds of individual authorship, slipping into a collective American consciousness. "Of course the legend is that Clement Moore wrote it on Christmas Eve 1822 for his children. That’s a nice story," says Marshall "and, since none of us were there we’ll never know for sure."

As another, greater, American mythmaker, John Ford, put it in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

’Twas The Night Before Christmas

’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,

In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,

While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;

And mamma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,

Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap,

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,

I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.

Away to the window I flew like a flash,

Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash ...