The Night Before Christmas Poem: Full Text & Who Wrote It

On 23 December 1823, readers of the Troy Sentinel, a newspaper in upstate New York, turned a page and found 56 lines of verse with no name attached. The editor printed them anyway, with a note admitting he had no idea whom to thank. Those lines became the night before Christmas poem, and two hundred years later people are still arguing about who wrote it.

Jump to the full poem

The short answer: It was first printed anonymously, as "Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas." Clement Clarke Moore, a New York professor, claimed it in 1844. The family of Henry Livingston Jr. has long said he wrote it, and nobody has settled it. The full text is just below.

The full text of the night before Christmas poem

Here it is in full, couplet by couplet, as first printed. One couplet is set apart in gray italics; the story of who wrote it, and why that couplet matters, follows the poem.

A poem that arrived with no name

The story most often told is that Harriet Butler, a Troy minister's daughter, had a copy of the poem and showed it to the Sentinel's editor, Orville L. Holley.

Holley ran it as "Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas," with a note that began: "We know not to whom we are indebted for the following description of that unwearied patron of children."

The professor who claimed it

Clement Clarke Moore taught at the General Theological Seminary in New York City, and a comic poem about a flying sleigh was not the reputation he was after. His name was first attached to it in print in 1837, in The New-York Book of Poetry. In 1844 he put it in his own collection, Poems, saying he had written it "not for publication, but to amuse my children."

For more than a century, that settled it.

The family who said it was theirs

Henry Livingston Jr. (1748–1828) was a New Yorker with Dutch roots on his mother's side, a former army major, and distantly related to Moore's wife. His descendants grew up with a family story: the poem was really his.

The trouble is the paper trail. No record survives of Livingston claiming the poem himself, and no printing with his name on it has ever been found. He died in 1828, sixteen years before Moore's book.

The detectives take sides

In 2000 the literary scholar Don Foster made the case for Livingston. The rhythm and word habits, he argued, matched Livingston's other writing; the Dutch touches suited a man with a Dutch mother; and Moore, who he said disliked tobacco, would never have given St. Nicholas a pipe.

Seth Kaller, a dealer in historical documents, answered point by point. He cited a Moore poem, "The Wine Drinker," that hardly reads like the work of a strict abstainer, and noted that Moore's friend Washington Irving had already given St. Nicholas a pipe in his 1809 History of New York.

The computers split too. A 2016 statistical study of style by MacDonald P. Jackson favored Livingston; two computer analyses in 2023 favored Moore. Four copies survive in Moore's handwriting, but a handwritten copy proves only that somebody wrote the words out, not who wrote them first.

What the argument can't change

Here is the turn in the story, and it has nothing to do with the author. Before this poem, Americans pictured St. Nicholas in all sorts of ways. After it, the picture settled: plump and jolly, dressed in fur, eight tiny reindeer, down the chimney, stockings filled, a finger laid aside his nose. Much of the Santa Claus people draw today started in these lines.

And whoever wrote it, it was written to be heard: four strong beats to a line, rhymes like a drumbeat, and a last line shouted into the night. It has lasted two centuries because families kept reading it aloud.

The reindeer names in 1823: Dunder and Blixem

Read the poem closely and you'll notice the last two reindeer don't quite sound like the two you know. In the 1823 printing, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer and Vixen are named exactly as they are today, and so are Comet and Cupid. But the final pair are called Dunder and Blixem, close to Dutch words for thunder and lightning. That Dutch flavor is one of the details Don Foster later pointed to when he argued the poem was Henry Livingston's, whose mother was Dutch.

The names didn't stay put. By the time Clement Clarke Moore included the poem in his own 1844 collection, the pair had become Donder and Blitzen, with Blitzen borrowed from German rather than Dutch, and rhyming more neatly with Vixen and Comet. Later printings drifted further still, to the "Donner and Blitzen" most people say today. Whichever version you read aloud, all eight names still call the reindeer to fly, and that's the part that hasn't changed in two centuries.

How to read it aloud to a young child

• Go slower than you think. The rhythm carries you, so you can linger on the good parts.
• Let them shout the reindeer. Pause before "Now, Dasher!" and let them call the names with you.
• Explain one old word, not ten. Make it "coursers": fast horses, and here, the reindeer.
• Give them something to look at. Old-fashioned words are much easier to follow with a picture for each couplet.

A picture for every couplet

That last point is why we made our Night Before Christmas coloring book the way we did. Each of the first 27 pictures has one couplet printed underneath, in order: you read a line, your child looks, and the coloring starts. The only couplet left out is the gray one above, about St. Nick's pipe, because the book is made for children aged 4 to 8. Yes, the same pipe the scholars argued over.

After the poem come 23 more Christmas scenes, and a small mouse in a Santa hat hides in all 50 pictures, a nod to "not even a mouse." Read one couplet a night from 28 November and the 27th lands on Christmas Eve.

You may also like our notes on the benefits of coloring for kids and on markers that don't bleed through.

Sources: the 1823 printing is transcribed on Wikisource. The authorship dispute, the handwritten copies and the 2016 and 2023 studies are summarized, with references, on Wikipedia.

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