'Twas the night before Christmas ... many of our holiday memories revolve around family gathered together on Christmas Eve to share time-honored Christmas tales. We want to relive that joy with you by recalling two old favorites that warm the heart and remind us once again that despite recent hardships, Christmas lives on.
A BIT OF HUMBUG
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is one of the world’s beloved novels. Written by one of England’s most renowned novelists, this holiday ghost story has had a profound impact far beyond Dickens’ wildest dreams. The story of Ebenezer Scrooge has become a Christmas tradition worldwide. Even if one has never heard the tale, the name “Scrooge” has become synonymous with miserliness and stinginess.
Surprisingly, A Christmas Carol was written during a decline in old holiday traditions. By the early nineteenth century, the centuries-long legacy of Puritan rule had succeeded in shoving Christmas into the backwaters. Father Christmas had become an outcast.
As early as the sixteenth century, the Puritans saw Christmas as a wasteful festival that threatened Christian beliefs and encouraged debauchery. The puritanical views led to legislation that abolished the feasts of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun (Pentecost). Until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Christmas was officially illegal. Even with the lifting of the ban, it took almost two centuries for Christmas to recover.
Despite prevailing customs, for the Dickens family, Christmas was celebrated in fine fashion. Wining and dining friends and family, their home was alive with the holiday spirit. Appalled by child labor and conditions of the poor, Dickens gave readily to charities and spoke publicly of their plight. For the author, this made Christmas all the more poignant.
He wrote his Christmas tale in a few weeks of frenzied inspiration, walking the streets of London after dark as his tale coalesced. In writing this seasonal ghost story, Dickens hoped to elevate the plight of the poor and to advocate for them. From the first day of publication, December 1843, the book was wildly successful, not only in England but abroad. Dickens’ message of love, hope, faith, and redemption struck a chord with many, and it wasn’t long before others followed suit and Christmas saw a revival.
Before long, his cast of characters — Ebenezer Scrooge, Jacob Marley, Tiny Tim, the Cratchits, and the three spirits, Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come became world renowned. Although today we most often associate ghost stories with Halloween, the cold and dark of winter was an ominous time for the Victorians. Freezing temperatures and lack of medical care were incredibly dangerous for the many impoverished people who lacked proper clothes, food and shelter. It was a plight Dickens saw on the streets of London every day.
A Christmas Carol was a crowd favorite, and he often read the tale as part of his philanthropic work. His 1867 debut in America was a rousing success, but his frantic schedule of 76 readings took a toll on his health. He returned to England a year later. With the news of his passing in 1869, one young English girl cried, “Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?”
Like Scrooge, Dickens was better than his word, not only opening his heart and pocketbook for those less fortunate, but leaving behind a literary legacy that is as pertinent today as it was over a century-and-a-half ago. The religious and secular sentiments of the season survive in no small part due to D
Charles Dickens in his study.
ickens’ vision of a Christmas ghost story he hoped would open the hearts and purses of all mankind.
A VISIT FROM ST. NICHOLAS
On a cold Christmas Eve, a family has just settled down for the night, when the father hears a disturbance out on the lawn. He watches, amazed, as a sleigh drawn by eight reindeer lands upon his roof, and down the chimney Saint Nicholas arrives with a sack full of toys. From that moment on, the image of Saint Nicholas, dressed in red, bearded, pipe in teeth, and rotund, transformed the image of Santa Claus we have all come to love.
(commonly entitled The Night Before Christmas), has an opening line that may be one of the best-known verses in American poetry. Surprisingly, the poem was first published anonymously in 1823 in the Troy, New York, Sentinel two days before Christmas. It was published anonymously each Christmas after, and it took 14 years for the author to be identified as Clement Clarke Moore. In 1844, Moore acknowledged the work as his own when he included it in his book of poems.
Moore was a writer, an American professor of Oriental and Greek Literature, Divinity and Biblical Learning at the General Theological Seminary in New York City. It has been said that Moore had not wanted his name to be connected with such childish prose, fearing it would taint his reputation as a scholar. Eventually, he stepped forward at the insistence of his children.
At the time, celebrating Christmas in a merry fashion was still contentious as the legacy of the Puritans, particularly in New England, abounded. Gradually, as various ethnic groups immigrated to America, they brought a diversity of holiday traditions with them – Christmas trees, yule logs, stockings hung on the fireplace mantle, and gifts left by Sinterklaas.
Aware of the disparities and not wishing to offend others, Moore portrayed his “jolly old elf” as arriving on Christmas Eve, thereby shifting focus away from the traditional religious observance of Christmas Day. It was a stroke of genius. Moore’s physical description of St. Nick would later define how others would portray the character going forward.
In later years, Moore claimed inspiration for the poem came during a snowy winter’s night sleigh ride to go shopping. Along the way he spotted a portly Dutch handyman who lived nearby. A simplistic explanation, but the story goes much deeper than that.
Moore was a fan of fellow New Yorker Washington Irving, a critically acclaimed writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat best known for his short stories Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Following visits to England, Irving wrote fondly of old English Christmases, with their dinners, dancing, decoration and merry making. Americans embraced Irving’s vision of Christmas, and the holiday made a revival in areas of the country where it had once been banned.
In 1809, Irving published his satirical Knickerbocker’s History of New York, portraying St. Nicholas as a pipe-smoking Dutchman with an elfish demeanor. Americanized legends of St. Nicholas grew from Irving’s stories and, eventually, morphed into the images described and illustrated in Moore’s poem. Over the generations, as American waistbands swelled, so did Santa’s.
The first reference to a sleigh pulled by a single reindeer appears in an illustrated children’s poem, Old Santeclaus with Much Delight, published anonymously in 1821. Whether Moore was influenced by this poem or not, his retinue of eight flying reindeer came not from legend but from his own imagination.
Each name needed to rhyme, of course. Dasher, meaning to dash or move quickly; Dancer, meaning to dance; Prancer, to strut in a stately manner; Vixen, an ill-tempered female; Comet, a mysterious celestial body; Cupid, a winged god; Donner, also referred to as Dunder, a Dutch word meaning thunder and lightning; and Blixen, who was originally referred to as Blixem, Dutch for lightning. At some point, the publisher changed the m to n, quite possibly to have Blixen rhyme better with Vixen.
The authorship of this delightful poem is not without controversy. By the time Moore was dead and long after it had been established as a staple of the Christmas season, debate raged over who wrote the poem. For years the Henry Livingston, Jr., family contended that their great-great-grandfather was the true author. Literary specialists, autograph experts, linguists and forensic scholars have poured over the writings of both men, but with little physical evidence available, the proof for either case is nearly impossible. Despite his reticence to claim authorship early on, Moore stated he wrote it “not for publication, but to amuse my children.” He claimed the Christmas poem in an 1844 letter as his “literary property, however small the intrinsic value of that property may be.”
Over the years, reprints of the poem have been credited to Moore, despite advocates for Livingston’s authorship arguing that Moore first tried to disavow the poem. Livingston’s family recalled hearing the story as far back as 1808. By 1837, Livingston had been dead nearly a decade, and Moore was at the pinnacle of his career. Who was there to step forth to challenge the poem’s origins?
In 2000, linguistic researcher Don Foster, a professor of English at Vassar, published an exhaustive study of the writing style of both Moore and Livingston, concluding that there is no way that Moore’s staid style could have produced A Visit from St. Nicholas. Much like the legend of St. Nicholas himself, we are only left with speculation and our imaginations. The poem has outlived all that brought it forth to the public, and best of all it remains in the hearts of all who believe in Santa Claus. “Merry Christmas to all,” and “God bless us every one!”