How a poem transformed Christmas into the festive holiday it is today (2025)

The American obsession with Santa Claus and the tradition of gift-giving merriment have a more complicated background than one might think. A peek at the December 23, 1823, issue of the Troy Sentinel offers a clue.

On that day, readers could peruse ads for buffalo robes and local honey or learn about the latest events in Congress. But those feeling the holiday spirit may have been drawn to the words “’Twas the night before Christmas” on page 3. The poem was brief—just a few stanzas—and, at the time, anonymously authored. Originally titled “Account of a Visit From St. Nicholas,” the poem told the tale of a father’s encounter with a lively Santa Claus and his reindeer.

Modern readers, who know the poem better by its first line, may see its account of Santa’s sojourn to a house filled with sleepy children and carefully hung stockings as a comforting depiction of a traditional Christmas. But its lines, claimed by Clement Clarke Moore, didn’t just reflect Christmas— they shaped it. The poem would go on to change the face of the holiday in the United States and beyond.

(How Christmas has evolved over centuries.)

A holiday recipe

It is not clear how the unsigned poem made its way to the Troy Sentinel. Sent anonymously, it was just one of many poems in the paper that day. Its origins are contested, but Moore later claimed to have written it for his nine children and to have read it out loud on Christmas Eve 1822. Though the verses’ origins were murky, their appeal was clear to editors, who passed it to other papers for republication, a common practice among 19th-century periodicals.

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“It gives readers a perfect template of what a domestic Christmas should look like,” says Thomas Ruys Smith, a professor of American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia who studies the history of Christmas in the United States. Far from tradition, Moore’s poem contained all the elements for a different kind of Christmas—one that, though relatively new, seems as normal as Easter eggs and Halloween jack-o’-lanterns today.

The poem spread, and readers besieged the Sentinel to ask who authored it. Only with the publication of The New-York Book of Poetry anthology 14 years later did an author, classics scholar Clement Clarke Moore, step forward.

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By then, the poem had beguiled a generation of children and influenced the Christmas traditions of generations to come. Before the 1820s, Smith explains, Christmas would have been unrecognizable to modern readers. Observation of the holiday— when it was celebrated at all—varied widely from region to region and usually involved street festivities and heavy drinking.

“Christmas isn’t widely celebrated in America at that point,” Smith tells History. “When it is, it’s a rowdy street celebration drawing on old-world traditions.” Those customs had become popular in western Europe, then spread to the U.S. along with the first waves of immigrants to the new nation.

Creating Christmas

The traditions reflected in Moore’s poem could not be more different. Instead of adult revelry, Moore’s Christmas involves sleeping children and a twinkling elf who sneaks into their homes at night to deliver gifts. Both toy-filled stockings and Santa himself are Dutch in origin, derived from the Netherlands’ annual feast celebrating Sinterklaas, or St. Nicholas, on December 5.

(From St. Nicholas to Santa Claus: the surprising origins of Kris Kringle.)

A new Santa for America

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The real St. Nicholas was a fourth-century bishop—not exactly the image of Christmas magic. The poem’s depiction of a dimpled, fur-clad elf differs greatly from Dutch tradition. In Holland, Sinterklaas is tall, rail-thin, and long-bearded. According to the Dutch, the saint’s traditional homeland is Spain, not the North Pole, and he has a controversial sidekick, Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). Even today, some white revelers portray the figure, a dark-skinned, demonic assistant often depicted in blackface. This courts contention about the Netherlands’ colonial and racial legacies, sparking ongoing debates that pit tradition against modern social attitudes.

Dutch New Yorkers recognized the holiday in their homes. But those without Dutch roots would only know about the tradition from fantastical stories by the likes of Moore’s friend Washington Irving. Irving’s 1809 story, A History of New York, a parody credited to a fictitious Dutch author, includes a dream in which a pipe-smoking St. Nicholas astonishes observers by flying through the sky in an enchanted wagon.

Moore was not Dutch but he was a New Yorker, and he borrowed prodigiously from Dutch traditions while writing the poem. He elaborated on customs and mixed in others, such as Santa’s legendary reliance on reindeer to pull his sleigh, an idea taken from an 1821 poem also anonymously published in New York. Moore went one step further, giving the reindeer names that originally included Donder and Blitzen (“thunder” and “lightning” in Dutch).

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Moore’s poem arrived at a crucial moment, says Smith: “It’s right at the pivot point where Christmas becomes far more of a domestic celebration focused on the family, the home, and children.” In the early days of the United States, celebrating Christmas was controversial, especially to those who subscribed to the austere Calvinism of America’s early white settlers. But changes were afoot by the early 1800s. As cities matured and industrialization beckoned, Americans began associating the holiday with the comforts of home. Assisted by a growing mass media that gave the poem a wider audience, Christmas became a time for family and childlike wonder.

That magic didn’t include what some considered a critical part of Christmas: Christianity. The poem sidesteps religion, depicting a secular holiday that offers a “Happy Christmas to all.” That contrasted with the opinions of many with the Calvinist view that Christmas be a solemn holiday, if celebrated at all. It also fueled an ongoing dispute about how religious Christmas should be—a debate that, Smith notes, still rages today.

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New traditions

If Moore’s mix of Dutch tradition and magic including stockings, supernatural chimney descents, and flying reindeer was the recipe, Americans followed it to a tee. The poem’s popularity led families without Dutch roots to try hanging up their stockings and giving gifts, posing as a mysterious St. Nick. Soon, Americans were adopting the traditions of other cultures too, from decorating German Christmas trees to sending and receiving Christmas cards, a practice inaugurated by England’s Queen Victoria in 1843. This was accelerated by retailers who encouraged Christmas consumption and even made up traditions of their own, such as Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, an invention of department store advertising copywriter Robert L. May.

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Along the way, “A Visit From St. Nicholas” persisted. It has been set to music by artists like Louis Armstrong and Perry Como, recited in films from The Santa Clause to National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and formed the basis of many parodies. Maybe its appeal lies in its sing-song rhymes, so easy for both children and parents to memorize, or the idea of a rotund, mischievous Santa whose secretive work happens each Christmas Eve.

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Regardless, the poem is still one of the most widely read American poems of all time—and an appealing template onto which Americans can project their whims and worries about the meaning of the ever-evolving holiday. Perhaps its greatest gift is its whimsical, benevolent Santa Claus, described in the poem’s original introduction as “that homely, but delightful personification of parental kindness.” Even if a Moore-influenced Santa Claus has long since passed your chimney by, there’s no escaping the holiday he helped create—or the nearly universal appeal of a silent house.

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This story appeared in the November/December 2024 issue ofNational Geographic Historymagazine.

How a poem transformed Christmas into the festive holiday it is today (2025)
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