a Visit

A Visit from Saint Nicholas, popularly known as The Night Before Christmas has been published by scads of companies with different illustrations each time. I have a few vintage versions of the book. This first book was given to me for my first Christmas in 1967. It is a "pillow book" which means the covers are padded and soft and they actually are! In the pictures you can see where my mom repaired it with brads through the spine, and tape that yellowed and dried up with age.

I absolutely love the illustrations in this book. They seem to be right out of the later Victorian era, but the poem was written 1822.

These dancing sugar plums always fascinated me, especially because I never received candy that looked like this, except for candy canes. I also liked the idea of the girls in one big bed, very Little House on the Prairie, in my childhood eyes!

Here he goes! Good thing those kids are sleeping!

Clement Clarke Moore, the author of this poem, was most famous in his own day as a professor of Oriental and Greek literature at Columbia College, now Columbia University.Moore wasn't writing for publication, but to delight his own six children. To that end, he transformed the legendary figure of St. Nicholas, the patron saint of children, into Santa Claus, a fairy tale character for children.Moore refused to have the poem published despite its enthusiastic reception by everyone who read it. His argument that it was beneath his dignity evidently fell on deaf ears, because the following Christmas "A Visit from St. Nicholas" found its way after all into the mass media when a family member submitted it to an out-of-town newspaper. The poem was an overnight sensation, as we would say today, but Moore would not acknowledge authorship of it until fifteen years later, when he reluctantly included it in a volume of collected works. He referred to the poem as a mere trifle. ~ David Emery @ About.com