Pushkin.

There are some sure signs that the holidays have arrived.

The lights go up on main street of the town where I live.

People pull their coats a little tighter around them as they go from shop to shop, and my colleague, then the daf Haffrey, shows up to tell me some absolutely crazy story about Christmas.

Twas the Night before Christmas.

He and God and all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

That's right.

This, of course, is a visit from Saint Nicholas, more commonly known as Twas the Night before Christmas, a poem that Ben has let's just say, learned a little too much about over the past few months.

Have you read the Stuart Little version of this, where, to save Stuart's feelings, the Littles rewrite it as not even a Laus, because I don't want it.

This too demeaning to my His poem's everywhere.

It's in Stuart Little.

It's die hard presidents read this poem.

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in hopes the Saint Nicholas soon would be there.

The children were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of sugar.

Sugar pumps danced in their heads.

I'm on her kerchief and I in my cap had just settled our brains.

Very weird choice of words there for a long winters.

Now this went on for.

What quick I knew in a moment it must be nick.

So this is this is the poem that creates, it fully launches the modern Santa Claus.

It's his, it's the first time the reindeers are named.

It's the first time he gets eight and not one.

And it's it.

It is the blueprint for American Christmas.

Very everyone thinks Christmas is this ancient thing.

There's no ever since that Jesus Christ was born on December twenty fifth.

The whole thing is this invented tradition, and it is this poem that gives us the modern American Christmas.

Written by Clement Clark Moore in eighteen twenty two, published in Upstate New York and The Troy Sentinel in eighteen twenty three.

Until you mentioned this to me, hadn't fully understood how extraordinary this accomplishment of this poem is.

I don't even like Christmas, I could guests.

So we've established this in prior versions of our Christmas.

Episode, I can get halfway through that from memory.

I suspect that an insanely high percentage of Americans can get a significant way into this poem from memory.

I would stake my life on the fact that more people this is the only poem that most people know totally.

Agree total, And I was going to say that an incredibly higher percentage of people of Americas not only know this poem from memory, but no other poems at this length from memory absolutely yeah.

Yeah, so, but the first thing people would have read of the Night Before Christmas is not even the poem.

In fact, it begins it is introduced by an editor's note that starts with the line we know not to whom we are indebted for the following description of that unwearied patron of children dot dot Santa Claus.

Yeah, it starts by acknowledging that they don't know who wrote it.

Yeah.

So it begins with an authorship mystery, and the authorship mystery persists.

Yes, so I propose to end it here today.

Yeah, you're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

Today we bring you our annual holiday spectacular, which this year is not about sugar plums, but about a historic theft, a literary crime that begins with a bold accusation.

For nearly two hundred years, have we your TRIPU did this immensely famous poem to the wrong person?

My colleague bend Adaf Haffrey has a story.

Oh, one last thing.

If you're listening with young children familiar with Santa Claus, this episode might challenge their sense of reality, Proceed with caution.

Sometime in the late nineteen nineties, a woman named Mary van Dusen logged onto the Internet.

She was looking up her great great great great great grandfather, Major Henry Livingston junior.

That's right, seven generations back, and while browsing the World Wide Web, she came across a piece of information that changed the course of her life.

One of the pages that came up was just a very short little page, but it said two things.

It said that Henry Livingston was a possible author of Night before Christmas, and it said that he had named his reindeer for the horses in his stable.

Who would believe it?

Henry Livingston Junior was a gentleman farmer and poet from a prominent early American family.

He was reputed to be a great lover of Christmas, and, crucially for our purposes today, not Clement Clark Moore, the person who had claimed authorship of the poem not long after its publication, and who for almost two centuries the general public has believed wrote it.

So to Marry and others in her family, it seemed he was also the victim of a historic injustice.

Just a couple decades after a visit from Saint Nicholas, the poem was published, his granddaughter came across a best selling holiday edition and saw the author's name clearly printed, Clement Clark Moore, at which point she brought it in a hurry to her mother, Henry's daughter in law, who said, someone has made a mistake.

Clement Moore did not write the night before Christmas.

Your grandfather, Henry Livingston wrote it.

They saw a wrong that needed to be writed.

So then you start looking at this right now.

Henry had never claimed authorship himself, but he died in eighteen twenty eight, so no one could ask him about it.

But the family remembered it as Henry's poem, and they took it upon themselves to do the research to prove it to the world, and so began the Great Livingston Quest.

This is Montague's and Cabulot's Hatfield and McCoy's Christmas Edition.

The first person took it up were the children of Catherine, my fourth grade grandmother, so I was always pleased about that.

At the beginning, all the family had was recollection relatives who said that Henry Livingston Junior had read the poem aloud to them when they were kids, but they needed to establish a record.

The gold standard would be a copy of the poem written in Henry's hand.

Decided they would collect as many pieces of paper as they could, and this is really a godsend because they were able to contact two of Henry's children before they died.

They heard that someone had gotten a copy of the poem that had Henry's handwriting on it, and do we have it today or no.

We don't because they're living on the frontier and the original burned in one of the house fires.

But the livingstones didn't quit.

When we talked, Mary walked me through the generations of people who've taken up the quest.

Since The next search for proof of Henry's authorship is from Henry Livingstone, a babylon Long Island.

I began to understand that this search was a kind of Livingstonian rite of passage, something handed from generation to generation like a precious gemstone, or like a feudal title, a matter of destiny.

Having your name in your birth announcement as having to research night before Christmas puts burden on your shoulders that is very heavy.

After all, this is an eminent family.

The genealogical tree Mary has put together includes George H.

W.

Bush W and Jeb as well as a congressman and a mayor of New York.

Eleanor Roosevelt was also in the mix somehow.

But alongside the campaigns and inaugurations, there is a single golden thread, the authorship question.

And I think part of that fixation must have had to do with what poetry meant at the time.

Malcolm and I talked about that over a glass of agnog at the annual Revision's History Holiday party.

One of the things that interests me it is a poem created in a very specific moment in time, the early nineteenth century, and because poetry plays a role in public life in back then in a way that it doesn't know.

Right, Well, some newspapers are the mass the mass medium, right, there's not television, radio, recorded sound doesn't exist.

So you have poems all over the place in newspapers and they are there.

They are off, they.

Can be satirical, they can be funny.

They're these very concise, pithy ways of expressing popular sentiments.

And the ones that are really gonna give you a good example, yeah, please.

My mom grew up in Jamaica during the Second World War, has all these hilarious poems written about the Second World War from a Jamaican perspective.

My favorite this one might be an it might be an English one.

You know, there are all these Americans come over in our station in England before the D Day.

So she would as a kid, my mom would recite this one, the gum chewing ink and the cut chewing cow, very alike.

The difference somehow, what is the difference?

I've got it now, the intelligent look on the face of the cow.

But it's to the point, right right that a lot of these what but the users trying to navigate is the indignity of this huge country of what people they consider to be their inferiors, uncultured coming and saving their bacon.

Right, it's humiliating, and how do they make sense of that humiliation?

To these poems?

Poems are doing all this.

Work very much like I'm almost like a meme today where it's like you see a thing and you're like, that gets it, that somehow ineffably puts its finger right on the pulse.

Yeah, And the pulse this poem had its finger on was that there was a crisis of Christmas.

At the very moment of its publication.

Before the visit trend from Saint Nick, Christmas was celebrated in a very different way.

Stephen Nissenbaum, author of the Pulitzer Prize, shortlisted the Battle for Christmas in his book.

He argues that Christmas was always about these social inversions.

So lower class people would live like kings for the best food, the best ale presents, provided they were peasants from then on.

But those traditions were better suited to grand old country estates where everyone knew each other and kind of accepted where they fit in the pecking order.

That was not the case in modern American democratic cities.

It was commonly celebrated as what I would call something of a cross between Halloween and New Year's Eve because of what amount to trick or treat.

Bands of young men, most of them pour from the working classes, went roving around town.

They'd stop at the more prosperous homes where they'd ask for food and alcohol.

But if they didn't get what they wanted, they would ostentatiously withhold that goodwill, or they might even threaten to do some small damage.

Christmas was getting out of control, and so a group of elite New Yorkers took the matter in hand.

We're talking about a small group of people who call themselves Knickerbackers, after the Dutch origins of the city.

But this was a kind of identity that they tried on to create again a sense of the good old days of New York when the classes did get along and the meshing worked very well.

The Knickerbockers were a conservative organization trying to invent new American traditions and also great names for basketball teams go NIXX, and they found a figurehead for their new version of Christmas in Saint Nicholas of Myra, patron Saint of merchants, bakers, brides, the falsely accused.

And children.

In the eighteen twenties, the lines between Saint Nicholas and the sort of scary figure of Santa Claus, a mythological gift giver, began to blur.

But how were the Knickerbockers going to unleash this new invention upon the huddled masses.

The answer came in eighteen twenty three with the poem we've been talking about in this episode, five hundred and forty two words about a guy named Saint Nicholas terrifying a well to do father by showing up in the middle of the night and instead of demanding the best grog in the house, leaving a bunch of presents, exactly the kind of poem Clement Clark Moore, an eminent New Yorker and friend of the Knickerbockers, would write at precisely that moment.

Moore was a Bible scholar.

He lived on an estate in Manhattan called Chelsea, which later did in fact become the neighborhood of Chelsea.

The New Christmas that Clement Clark Moore was promulgating continued, in a very innocent way, the old social inversion, but in this case it wasn't the rich changing places with the poor.

It was the grown ups changing places with the kids.

So the children have really replaced the working class in the new Christmas.

This was a version of Christmas that worked, and it just got bigger.

Clement Moore's estate shrank, but his legend and the legend of his poem grew until the Livingstons caught wind of it.

The problem was that, despite all their efforts, no Livingstone had been able to turn up any conclusive, historical or documentary evidence proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Henry Livingston Junior had written the poem.

But what if there was another approach?

An ancestor of Mary van Dusen's hit upon this idea in a letter from the nineteen twenties.

She had been interviewed for an article in the Christian Science Monitor on the authorship question, one of the first times this claim that Henry Livingston Junior had written the poem went national.

This, it turned out, was kind of a jarring experience for her, so she wrote to her cousin William, who'd set the whole thing up.

Quote.

I am writing from my bed.

I could not sleep last night, and thinking over our conversation, I got drawn into this cross examination, which was quite inquisitorial in its nature.

For the problematical authorship of that poem.

It is a very delicate question to handle, and I am not at all in favor of a writer for a Christian science paper handling it.

It ought to be touched on, very delicately, and by some man of eminent literary attainments.

Wait till you find the fit man to do it.

We relatives would only have dirt thrown at us by press and people, for see Moore is a demigod almost in their eyes.

Almost a century has this fetish been adored.

And I will not have myself or my family mixed up in it.

It is too delicate a subject to be dragged and raked about except with great tact and reverence.

Wait till you get someone of high literary merit to write about the authorship.

Do not make this any but a first class writer.

End quote.

Without documentary proof, the Livingstones needed to make a stylistic argument that this poem sounded like Livingstin and not like more and only someone of literary attainments could really land it.

The Living Stones would wait nearly eighty years until Mary van Dusen came across that website, took up the family quest and found such a scholar.

At last, I figured I needed a poetry expert, so I went to the internet and I looked at a archive poetry.

I saw Ian Lancashire as the expert of the website and sent to email and I said, I have this problem.

What do I do?

And he said, you find Don.

When we're back.

Don the man ab eminent literary attainments and the very best thing the Livingstons could ever hope to find in their stockings.

It's the week before Thanksgiving, the year two thousand.

A group of people file into a bookstore in Washington, d C.

To have their very sense of reality challenged.

The event aired on c SPAN.

Thanks is great to be with you this evening.

This is Don Foster.

At the time, he was an English professor at Vassar.

He's straight out of Central Casting Laser khakis, tie handsome in a dead poet's Society kind of way.

When he makes a particularly devilish point, he shrugs his shoulders almost imperceptibly as his eyes wander to the corner of his great big glasses, as if to say, do I dare to eat a peach.

Do I dare disturb the universe?

I do.

My office is what you would expect in English professor's office to be piled high with student papers and with writings I have studied by poets and play rights.

I'm still unknown, but intermixed with the literary text are others by Felon Zealotz or Nameless resent Nix, whose identity your actions were of sufficient interest for someone to ask who wrote this thing?

Professor Foster made his name arguing that an anonymously published poem called a Funeral Elegy was actually written by William Shakespeare.

He'd used modern computer analysis to argue it so forcefully that anthologies were updated and the press took note.

Foster's phone began to.

Ring, Professor, do you know that you're going to be on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow?

And I said, well, Professor, a star was born.

Foster practiced a kind of forensics called literary attribution.

The premise was that each of us has a style, a kind of fingerprint in the way we write that, if revealed, would prove conclusively that we wrote something.

Dusting for that fingerprint relied on two key methodologies.

First, computer analysis, where statistic patterns could be detected in an author's work, kind of like large language models.

Now a second, an investigator would marshal their own powers of close reading.

For instance, just weeks after the Shakespeare story blew Up, Foster was asked to identify the anonymous author of a dish novel called Primary Colors, a thinly veiled account of the Clinton campaign.

Foster had a list of suspects.

He fed samples of their writing into his computer and began to look closely at how the book was written.

The anonymous writer showed a preference for adverbs with l y endings like vaguely.

He used dashes to make compound words like triple back over somersault and pander pirouette.

He liked zany adjectives.

His pros thought Foster revealed certain racial ideas, and all those signs pointed clearly to the journalist Joe Klein.

Foster nailed it.

Klin eventually fessed up, and this was when things started to get weird for the professor.

And at that point prosecutors and defenders and police and other investigators saw in my work application that I had not really thought of myself questioned.

Documents in criminal cases and other kinds of anonymous libels Harris mensa were suddenly being sent to me and saying, can you figure out who wrote this?

Soon Foster was teaching my day and by night working the Unibomber case, the John Benet Ramsay case, the Anthrax case, and few major news items of the late nineteen nineties were beyond the literary forensics.

Single was Don Foster a report at Monica Lewinsky wrote the three page document.

So I now go back and ask the question, did she really?

The crowd in the bookstore is wrapped around his finger, and that's when he starts talking about Mary van Dusen, the great great great great great granddaughter of Major Henry Livingston junior.

I got a phone call in August of nineteen I twenty nine from a woman who said that she thought that her ancestor wrote The Night before Christmas, not Clement Clark Moore.

Mary and Don teamed up.

She traveled the country searching for proof every version of the Night before Christmas that was ever written.

She made a corpus of Henry's work.

She got a microfilm machine for her house for her house and read every single newspaper she could find from seventeen seventy five to eighteen thirty.

In order to establish a documentary record, she put it all on a website, which ran ultimately to over fifteen thousand pages by her account, in hopes that Don could do his detective work and find an answer, and he did.

He began to look into questions of style, just like he did with primary colors.

What sort of adjectives were used, what kind of adverbs, what sort of attitudes were expressed?

He compared a visit from Saint Nicholas to other poems by Moore and Livingstone.

Hundreds of thousands of words had been written on this subject, and we all have all lace to get to.

So I'm going to be selective about what we talk about here.

But a good example of the case he made is the question of anapestic to trameter, an extremely tedious matter that, of course, is the only thing Malcolm wanted to talk about when I saw him.

I want to be in the graduate seminar with you where this poem is taking seriously.

Okay, let's let's let's uh, let's break down the formal qualities of this poem.

First, there's the meter, which is sort of the crucial thing here.

This poem is in a extremely popular meter used for light versus satire called anipestic to trameter.

So give it rhythmically, give me lines at show.

Twas the night before Christmas went all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

Da da dum da da dumba so.

Dumbda d d.

Dump.

And you, as a parent might be familiar with this from like all of Doctor SEUs, So like Horton, here's a who on the fifteenth of May and the jungle of newle and the heat of the day and the cool of the pool he was splashing, and you know this kind of like it trips off the tongue.

An anipest is aligne.

It's two unstressed syllables and a stressed one.

So it's dadda dumb, dadda dumb.

That's like a dadda dumb.

That's an anipest to trameter tetra from the Latin for four.

It means there's four of those per line of an anipestic to trameter.

It's such an infectious meter.

It's easier to memorize and so it can transmit through word of mouth much more easily, which is what happens with this this poem as well.

In fact, it is it's it's so good for the spoken word that the way many people probably know it today other than to was the night before Christmas is the way I am by eminem was the night before Christmas, and all through the house it's like it's it just like it hooks you in.

So Foster alleged that More was way too serious to be a big anipestic to Trameter.

He says that Moore condemned the quote depraved taste in poetry of those who read anipestic satire end quote.

In essence, Livingstone was way more likely to write an anipest than More, not least of all because he was just a really fun guy.

Here's a little sample of Henry Livingston's verse.

This is why he closes one of his many Christmas and New Year's poems, but his time that I bid you goodbye till next year by wishing you happiness, peace and good cheer.

And he has the kind of poem after poem after poem in this vein many of them Christmas or New Year's poems.

Then he turns his attention to Clement Clark Moore.

Clement Clark Moore I thought was pretty Santa Claus kind of guy too, But as it turns out, this is part of the lore that's arisen after his name was associated with the poem.

It was quite the curmudgeon.

One might even say scrooge, I might even say grinch.

He writes things like humble the praise and trifling the regard, whichever way upon the moral barred.

And then he goes on to scold women for wearing cosmetics or to unchastised children for being too noisy.

Quite a severe man.

So, according to Foster, on the one hand, we have a good cheer to the ladies kind of guy, and then there's the grinch scrooge.

You could say maybe Moore didn't stand a chance just based on this character assassination.

But there was more.

In his book, Foster compared the two men further.

Henry Livingston Junior fought for independence, Clement Moore was allegedly a slave owner.

Livingston was a quote friend of the Indians.

Moore descended from the guy who talked the Mohawks into selling Long Island and stylistically even setting aside the slam dunk of the anapestic tetramoner, the poem is Livingston all over the use of the adverbial all as in the children were nestled, all snug in their beds, and then some funny business with the reindeer names.

It all looked very, very suspicious.

Don Foster, the man of eminent literary attainments, had apparently solved the mystery.

At law last, the press went wild.

Finally tonight, the mystery of a visit from Saint Nicholas.

It has been a holiday tradition since eighteen twenty two.

But who really wrote the famous poem?

He was in the New York Times twice.

He was on network television.

Don Foster is sort of a literary sleuth.

He was the one who discovered journalist Joe Klein was the anonymous author of the bestseller Primary Colors.

He studies the author's words and styles, and in this case he says, Henry Livingston's literary fingerprints are all over.

The night before Christmas.

Don Foster's argument spread The city of Troy, whose newspaper famously first published the poem, hosted as a kind of Christmas media event, a mock trial in a real courtroom, presided over by a former New York Supreme Court judge and argued by actual lawyers on the question of who wrote the poem.

As the Jerry reached a verdict, Jerry and Edgeley decided that the author was Ane for Christmas Is.

This prompted the Mayor of Troy to issue a proclamation quote that December twenty third, twenty fourteen is Henry Livingston Junior Day and Troy, New York.

Famous musicians have reportedly announced on stage that Henry Livingston Junior is the real author of the poem.

The Freaking Poetry Foundation website has a page for Henry Livingston Junior, crediting him as the author of the poem.

Unambiguously.

This is not ubiquitous, but through Don Foster, Mary van Duzen, and the Livingstons had achieved something her ancestors could only ever have dreamed of.

And even if people stopped short of denying Moore's authorship everywhere, people began to question it.

After nearly two centuries of injustice, the Livingston family quest was paying.

Off to myself come around to the view and that this whole family legend was right in fact has I think finally been vindicated, and Bible professors claimed to this poem, I think is not just highly suspect, but waiting to see what the opposition might have to say.

Oh but the opposition was watching, and they didn't like what they saw.

A couple of months ago, I visited Seth Kaller, a famed dealer of historic documents in White Plains, New York.

Statues of Abraham Lincoln were strewn about the office.

Advanced copies of Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech.

An original Prince of the Constitution hung on the wall the Constitution I Have a Dream twas the night before Christmas.

At the time the controversy erupted because of Don Foster's book, I owned what was thought to be the only copy in private hands, written by Clemency Moore.

Caller became embroiled in the authorship.

Question, and so a New York Times reporter called me and asked me about it, And you know, I said, I didn't know, let me look into it.

And I was totally open minded.

I mean, if I had been convinced, I would have changed my description of it and or mentioned the controversy.

But the more I got into it, you know, the more upset I got by the dishonesty of the arguments made against Clement Moore.

So I kept going even after I thought this is sufficient to you know, make the case.

You did send me quite a long document in preparation for this conversation.

Yeah, and I could have sent you a lot more.

Caller began to go through the claims in Don Foster's book, and he soon found that most of them, We're deeply suspicious.

The comparable phraseology that table confused me.

Would you?

Would you explain the origin of that table?

Let me find it?

Caller got out of binder stuffed with papers.

Nobody is taking this matter lightly.

In fact, we spent an entire afternoon going through this.

Let's stick to the big ticket items today first style.

More wouldn't write like this, but Caller showed me a chart comparing parts of the poem with other poems More had written.

Here's another from another one of his writings, Twas an autumnal morn, celestial bright, the all Snug and from something else.

In The Snug and Tidy Night before Christmas, he talks about visions of sugar plums danced in their heads.

One of the rhymes in Night.

Before Christmas is a clatter and matter, and in another poem is.

Words, feelings, thought phrases.

These would all be evidence that More could have written the Night Before Christmas, and in fact did write the Night Before Christmas, as opposed to you know, just making the arguments that he couldn't have because he didn't use these for these words.

So maybe Livingston as author can't be proven stylistically, But that's not all he and his colleagues found.

The historical argument about when Henry would have needed to write the poem in order to be the author didn't line.

Up either, But the fact that all of the stories that the Livingston family have told can be actually disproven.

You know, oh, was taken by a nanny, and then you prove that, well, then nanny wasn't there for another eight years.

Also suspect Foster's finding that Moore was a humorless scrooge, which was often a clear case of taking something More had written out of context.

What I found wasn't just that it was misinterpreted, but that it was elited to the point where if you just read the full sentence, it actually proves the opposite of what is being used to.

Argue Now.

I can't know the mind of Don Foster, but there were at least a few examples of his attributions not exactly panning out.

A couple of years after his book Author Unknown came out, he retracted his famous claim that Shakespeare had written the Funeralogy, under mounting skepticism, and after he wrote an article seeming to suggest an innocent government scientist was responsible for sending the anthrax letters after September eleventh, he was sued for libel, settled for some undisclosed amount of money, and went back to being predominantly a vasser English professor.

I had hoped to interview him for this story, but he declined to speak with me through a colleague.

He'll keep Christmas in his way, and I'll keep it in mind.

But in my view, Foster's argument has done a grave injustice to Clement Clark Moore that we, the staff of Revisionist History and associates in the Rare Documents trade, refused to leave unchallenged.

And his book Arthur Unknown is still referred to and still used by, you know, people who are looking into it.

And then so many other reporters go with it as the story if he said she said that.

I don't blame the family as much as I blame some of the scholars who should know better.

But it does still bother.

Me, Like if I bring up or the last time I did was years ago, bring up the idea of a museum exhibit and Clement Moore's authorship.

Some accept it outright, but others have been, well, we have to be careful, we have to talk about the controversy.

No, you know, you have to acknowledge that there was one, but you should not pretend that it's actually real.

Christmas is all about your dreams coming true.

Maybe Foster tried to do that for Mary, But to my mind, in the end, I think what they set in motion was a satisfying and to the mystery, it just wasn't the conclusion they'd hoped for.

It's fine with me that you come to a different position than I do.

I don't ever say flatly that Henry wrote the poem.

I say, I believe that Henry wrote the poem, and here's the data, and make up your own mind.

So if you use it to come to a different conclusion than I do, that's fine.

At least you examine the issue and you feel peace in yourself at the answer you come to.

Then, was there was there one bit of evidence set for you really sealed the case.

Yeah.

This whole argument against Clenen Clark Moore relies on the idea that he's a scrooge who would never write about Christmas.

He would never never write light verse, never write about fairies, certainly never write about Santa Claus and Christmas.

And these researchers found not just one, but two effectively Christmas poems by Clement Clark Moore that pre date or are in tight sequence with a Visit from Saint Nicholas.

So the first is a letter called from Saint Nicholas, which is literally in the voice of Santa Claus to Clemic Clark Moore's kid, which I guess, true to his haters, is about why she's not getting any presents that year, though it is very sweet and crucially it's an anithestic determiner.

But this one is the one that I actually really love.

The Melville scholar Scott Norsworthy thinks that this poem and a Visit from Saint Nicholas were written at the same time.

There was a snowstorm in New York on December twenty first.

Was a Saturday in eighteen twenty two, Throughoute this poem called lines, written after a snowstorm.

I'll read it to you.

Come, children, dear, and look around.

Behold how soft and light the silent snow has clad the ground in robes of purest white.

The trees seem decked by fairy hand nor knead their native green, and every breeze appears to stand all hushed to view the seam.

You wonder how the snows are made that dance upon the air, as if from purer worlds they strayed so lightly and so fair.

Perhaps they are the summer flowers in northern stars, that bloom wafted away from icy bowers to cheer our winter's gloom.

Perhaps they are feathers of a race of birds that live away in some cold, dreary, wintry place, far from the sun's warm ray and clouds.

Perhaps are downy beds on which the winds repose, who, when they rouse their slumbering heads, shake down the feathery snows.

But see, my darlings, while we stay and gaze with fond delight the fairy scene.

Soon fades away and mocks our raptured sight, and let this fleet eating vision teach truth.

You soon must know that all the joys we here can reach are transient as the snow.

They say something.

Christmas is a made up holiday.

The core of it is these weird social inversions that last for a day and then melt like the new fallen snow.

In that sense, I think it's easy to see why the story that Henry Livingston Junior actually wrote this poem gets retold so often.

It's another Christmas ee inversion, one about as old as modern Christmas itself, just another story about a thing that's not as it seems.

Fat men in velvet robes sliding down thin chimneys, everything you ever wanted under a tree that's indoors, and your great great great great great grandfathers forgotten roll in inventing Christmas.

I don't believe it, but then again tis the season.

Revisionist History is produced by me Bennatt of Haffrey, with Nina Bird Lawrence and Lucy Sullivan.

Our editor is Karen Schakergie fact checking by Onica Robbins.

Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Production support from Luke Lehmand engineering by David Herman at Good Studios and Nina Bird Lawrence.

Original music was composed, arranged, and recorded by Luis Gara, mixing and mastering bar Marcelo di Olivera.

I have stood on the shoulders of giants for this absurd episode.

All credit to the scholars and writers who made this possible, Scott Norsworthy of the Melvileana Blog, Tom Jerman, and Justin Fox.

To our friends in Troy, the incomparable Duncan Crairie and city historian Kathy Shehan.

If I've left you unconvinced about Moore's authorship, you can read the latest salvo from the Livingstonians in the book Who Wrote The Night Before Christmas by Professor MacDonald P.

Jackson.

Just be sure to read Scott Norseworthy's response to it on the Melvilliana Blog right afterwards.

From Revisionist History, Happy holidays and we'll see you all in the new year.