The Poem That Invented Santa Claus

On December 23, 1823, the Troy Sentinel, a small paper in Troy, New York, printed a poem called "Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas" with no author attached. Family friends had passed it along; the man who wrote it, Clement Clarke Moore, taught Greek and Divinity at the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea, on land his own family had donated on Manhattan's West Side. Moore was a serious scholar, and a poem about a plump old elf squeezing down a chimney wasn't the kind of thing he wanted his name on. He didn't claim it publicly until 1837, and only put his own name to it in 1844, printing it in a book of his poems mostly to amuse his children. By then the picture it drew, the miniature sleigh, the eight tiny reindeer, the stockings, the chimney entrance, had already become the American Santa Claus.