The Night Before Christmas

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Nissenbaum, in an essay called “There Arose Such a Clatter: Who Really Wrote ‘The Night Before Christmas’? (And Why Does It Matter?),” writes that Moore and his social circle “felt that they belonged to a patrician class whose authority was under siege,” and that their interest in St. Nicholas “was part of a larger, ultimately 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-nineteenth-century city.”

There it is: the reindeer have names – names that will live on as long as December 25th is celebrated as a holiday. Additionally, in 2000, forensic linguist and Vassar College English professor Donald Foster concluded in his book, Author Unknkown, that Livingston authored the poem.

'Quite likely that the matter can never be settled'

Jessie Willcox Smith (right side, facing the camera) with artist Violet Oakley (left side, facing the camera), illustrator Elizabeth Shippen Green and horticulturist Henrietta Preface Cozens, a mutual friend of the three artists. Photograph from the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Moore was neither the dull pedant nor the joy-hating prude that Don Foster makes him out to be. Of Henry Livingston himself I know only what Foster has written, but from that alone it is clear enough that he and Moore, whatever their political and even temperamental differences, were both members of the same patrician social class, and that the two men shared a fundamental cultural sensibility that comes through in the verses they produced. If anything, Livingston, born in 1746, was more a comfortable gentleman of the high eighteenth century, whereas Moore, born thirty-three years later in the midst of the American Revolution, and to loyalist parents at that, was marked from the beginning with a problem in coming to terms with the facts of life in republican America.

From the introduction of the edition from 1912 we can perceive Moore’s motivation behind writing the poem. Lowe, James. "A Christmas to Remember: A Visit from St. Nicholas". Autograph Collector. January 2000. 26–29.

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Clement Clarke Moore | American scholar and author". britannica.com. Encyclopedia Britannica . Retrieved January 18, 2019. And that would have been the end of any mystery of attribution, except for one problem: the family of Henry Livingston, a gentleman farmer from Poughkeepsie, insisted that it was Livingston, not Moore, who wrote the Christmas classic. In 1813, Moore married Catherine Elizabeth Taylor, daughter of William Taylor and Elizabeth (née Van Cortlandt) Taylor. William Taylor was a New Jersey lawyer who had served as chief justice of Jamaica. [35] Elizabeth Van Cortlandt was a direct descendant of Stephanus Van Cortlandt, the first native-born mayor of New York City and first patroon of Van Cortlandt Manor, as well as the niece by marriage of Sir Edward Buller, 1st Baronet. [36] Together, Catherine and Clement Moore were the parents of nine children: [37]

Sounds like someone from NY who has never seen a hurricane, possibly Clement Moore himself, possibly the one from whom some say he borrowed it.

Siefker, Phyllis (1997). Santa Claus, Last of the Wild Men. McFarland & Company. p.4. ISBN 0-7864-0246-6.