Twas the Night Before Christmas

Summary

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Revisionist History: "Twas the Night Before Christmas"

Host: Malcolm Gladwell • Guest/Producer: Ben Nadaff-Haffrey
Date: December 18, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this holiday special, Malcolm Gladwell and Ben Nadaff-Haffrey investigate the true authorship of “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” America’s most ubiquitous poem. While commonly attributed to Clement Clarke Moore, a centuries-long family quest claims the true author is Henry Livingston Jr. The episode explores family legend, literary forensics, and the complex ways in which traditions—and authorship—are constructed, contested, and mythologized.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. How “Twas the Night Before Christmas” Shaped American Christmas

[02:49–04:23]

• The poem, originally titled “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” is presented as the blueprint for modern American Christmas.
• "It's the first time the reindeers are named. It's the first time he gets eight and not one. And it is the blueprint for American Christmas." (Ben Nadaff-Haffrey, [03:40])
• Gladwell and Ben reflect on the poem’s cultural pervasiveness, with Gladwell noting, “I suspect that an insanely high percentage of Americans can get a significant way into this poem from memory.” ([04:36])

2. The Authorship Mystery Emerges

[05:05–05:38]

• The poem was first published anonymously; the original editor’s note admits they do not know the author.
• Family legend—and persistent rumor—has long suggested Henry Livingston Jr. as the real writer.

3. The Livingston Family’s Multi-Generational Quest

[06:30–10:14]

• Mary Van Dusen, Livingston’s descendant, describes discovering a website suggesting her ancestor wrote the poem.
• The Livingston family spent generations looking for proof, with only oral histories and lost documents due to a house fire.
• Mary reflects: “Having your name in your birth announcement as having to research [the] Night Before Christmas puts a burden on your shoulders. That is very heavy.” ([10:04])

4. Christmas Before Moore: A Social Transformation

[10:47–16:02]

• Gladwell and Ben discuss how poetry was central to early 19th-century public life.
• Historian Stephen Nissenbaum explains how Christmas was once a raucous, class-inverting holiday—almost akin to “a cross between Halloween and New Year’s Eve”—and how the Knickerbockers (elite New Yorkers) reimagined it as a family-friendly, child-oriented tradition through the poem. ([12:44–16:02])

  “The new Christmas... It was the grownups changing places with the kids.” (Stephen Nissenbaum, [15:35])

5. The Livingstonian Stylistic Argument

[17:32–18:46], [27:48–30:34]

• The family lacks definitive documentary evidence but turns to literary forensics.
• Enter Don Foster, literary detective, known for forensic authorship analysis (famously unmasking Joe Klein as the author of "Primary Colors").

6. Literary Forensics: Don Foster’s Case Against Moore

[22:38–33:50]

• Don Foster uses computer analysis and close reading to argue for Livingston’s authorship of the poem.
• Formal qualities, such as anapestic tetrameter (the poem’s bouncy, memorable meter), supposedly fit Livingston’s style more than Moore’s.

  “Foster alleged that Moore was way too serious to be a big anapaestic tetrameter guy. He says that Moore condemned the ‘depraved taste in poetry’ of those who read anapestic satire.” (Ben Nadaff-Haffrey, [29:23])

• Personality contrast is drawn ("good cheer to the ladies kind of guy" vs. "The Grinch… Scrooge, you could say.").
• The case spreads—mock trials, city proclamations, even the Poetry Foundation list Livingston as author.

  "Don Foster, the man of eminent literary attainments, had apparently solved the mystery. At long last, the press went wild." (Ben Nadaff-Haffrey, [31:48])

7. The Moore Defense: Pushing Back on Foster’s Findings

[37:32–42:43]

• Seth Kaller, rare documents expert, methodically debunks Foster’s arguments and upholds Moore’s authorship.
• Style comparisons reveal Moore actually used similar language and meter elsewhere (“all snug,” “visions of sugar plums,” etc.).
• Kaller points out timing inconsistencies in the Livingston family’s stories and exposes misinterpretations and context-omitting quotes in Foster’s book.

  "What I found wasn't just that it was misinterpreted, but that it was elided to the point where if you just read the full sentence, it actually proves the opposite of what is being used to argue." (Seth Kaller, [40:42])

8. Intellectual Humility & the Power of Tradition

[42:58–43:37]

• Mary Van Dusen accepts others may reach different conclusions:

  "It's fine with me that you come to a different position than I do… At least you examine the issue and you feel peace in yourself at the answer you come to." ([42:58])

9. The Key Evidence (and Gladwell’s Final Take)

[43:37–47:25]

• Ben highlights that Moore did indeed write other Christmas poems in similar styles—contradicting the “Scrooge” stereotype.
• Ben quotes one of Moore’s sentimental snow-themed poems in the same meter.
• The episode closes on the note that the debate endures—fitting for a holiday built around myth, inversion, and family legend.

  “Christmas is a made up holiday. The core of it is these weird social inversions… In that sense, it’s easy to see why the story that Henry Livingston Jr. actually wrote this poem gets retold so often. It’s another Christmassy inversion, one about as old as modern Christmas itself.” (Ben Nadaff-Haffrey, [47:25])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the poem’s ubiquity:

  “I would stake my life on the fact that more people—this is the only poem that most people know.”
  — Ben Nadaff-Haffrey ([04:46])

• Mary Van Dusen, on family legacy:

  “They saw a wrong that needed to be righted.”
  — [08:04]

• Stephen Nissenbaum, on Christmas inversion:

  “It was commonly celebrated as what I would call something of a cross between Halloween and New Year’s Eve because of what amounts to trick or treat.”
  — [13:24]

• Don Foster, on authorial fingerprinting:

  “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.”
  — [24:04]

• Seth Kaller, on evidence:

  “There are all these words, feelings, thoughts, phrases. These would all be evidence that Moore 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 words.”
  — [39:25]

• Gladwell, on tradition and scrutiny:

  “The story that Henry Livingston Jr. actually wrote this poem gets retold so often. It’s another Christmassy inversion, one about as old as modern Christmas itself.”
  — [47:25]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:49] – Poem’s significance and ubiquity
• [05:05] – Publication history and the authorship mystery
• [06:30] – The Livingston family quest
• [12:44] – Christmas as a social inversion; St. Nicholas reimagined
• [22:51] – Don Foster’s literary forensics
• [27:48] – Anapestic tetrameter and stylistic analysis
• [37:32] – Seth Kaller’s counter-investigation
• [42:58] – Mary Van Dusen on intellectual humility
• [43:37] – Ben presents Moore’s holiday poetry
• [47:25] – The meaning of myth, inversion, and Christmas stories

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Tone & Style

• Playful, curious, scholarly, with Gladwell’s signature wry asides
  • Intellectual rigor, narrative drive, and humor channeling the holiday spirit
  • Respect for myth and family tradition even as scrutiny is applied

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Conclusion

This festive Revisionist History episode deftly navigates literary mystery, family lore, and historical context to reassess our most beloved Christmas poem. Gladwell and Ben ultimately let listeners draw their own conclusions—mirroring the poem’s transformation from anonymous invention to enduring tradition, and reminding us that sometimes, the greatest magic is how we retell our stories.

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Recommended if you enjoy:

• Literary detective stories
• Social history
• Holiday myth-busting
• The quirks of family legend

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Transcript

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[Don Foster]

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Don Foster]

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Don Foster]

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Sophie Cunningham]

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

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, Ben Nadaf Halfrey shows up to tell me some absolutely crazy story about Christmas.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Twas the night before Christmas. Oh my God. And all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. That's right.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

This, of course, is a visit from St. 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.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Have you read the Stuart Little version of this? Where to save Stuart's feelings, the Littles rewrite it as not even a louse because they don't want it as too demeaning to my story to have. Though this poem's everywhere. It's in Stuart Little. It's in Die Hard Presidents. Read this poem.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Keep going.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there. The children were nestled all snug in their beds While visions of sugar plums.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Danced in their heads.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

My ma and her kerchief and I in my cap had just settled our brains. Very weird choice of words there. For a long winter's nap. Nap.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

This went on for a while.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

I knew in a moment it must be Nick. 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. Yeah. And it is the blueprint for American Christmas. Everyone thinks Christmas is this ancient thing. There's no evidence that Jesus Christ was born on December 25. The whole thing is this invented tradition. And it is. It is this poem that gives us the modern American Christmas. Written by Clement Clarke Moore in 1822, published in Upstate New York in the Troy Sentinel in 1823.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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 get.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

So we've established this in prior versions of our Christmas episode, but I can.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Totally agree.

[Don Foster]

Totally.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And I was gonna say that an incredibly high percentage of people of America not only know this poem from memory, but know no other poems at this length from memory.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Absolutely.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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, Santa Claus. It starts by acknowledging that they don't know who wrote it.

[Don Foster]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

So it begins with an authorship mystery.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Yes.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And the authorship mystery persists.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Yes. Though I propose to end it here today. Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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 200 years have we attributed this immensely famous poem to the wrong person. My colleague Ben Nadaff 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.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Sometime in the late 1990s, a woman named Mary Van Dusen logged onto the Internet. She was looking up her great, great, great, great, great grandfather, Major Henry Livingston Jr. 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.

[Mary Van Dusen]

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?

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Henry Livingston Jr. 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 Clarke 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 Mary and others in her family, it seemed he was also the victim of a historic injustice. Just a couple decades after a visit from St Nicholas, the poem was published. His granddaughter came across a best selling holiday edition and saw the author's name clearly Clement Clarke 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 Livingstone wrote it.

[Mary Van Dusen]

They saw a wrong that needed to be righted.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

So then you start looking into this right now. Henry had never claimed authorship himself, but he died in 1828, 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 Levinston quest. This is Montague's and capulets, Hatfields and McCoys Christmas edition.

[Mary Van Dusen]

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

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

At the beginning, all the family had was recollection. Relatives who said that Henry Livingston Jr. 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.

[Mary Van Dusen]

They 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.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

They heard that someone had gotten a copy of the poem that had Henry's handwriting on it. And do we have that today or.

[Mary Van Dusen]

No, we don't, because they're living on the frontier and the original burned in one of the house fires.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

But the Livingstons didn't quit when we talked. Mary walked me through the generations of people who've taken up the quest since.

[Mary Van Dusen]

The next search for proof of Henry's authorship is from Henry Livingston of Babylon, Long Island.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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.

[Mary Van Dusen]

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

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

After all, this is an eminent family. The genealogical tree Mary has put together includes George H.W. bush, Dubya and Jeb, as well as a congressman and the mayor of New York. Eleanor Roosevelt was also in the mix somehow. But alongside the campaigns and inaugurations, there was a single golden 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 eggnog at the annual Revisionist History holiday party.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

One of the things that interests me, it is a poem created in a very specific moment in time, the early 19th century. And because poetry plays a role in public life back then in a way that it doesn't.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Right. Well, so newspapers are the mass medium. There's not television. Radio, recorded sound doesn't exist. So you have poems all over the place in newspapers. And they are. There's. 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.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Can I give you a good example?

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Yeah, please.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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 English, might be an English one. You know, there are all these Americans come over and are stationed in England before the invade, before D Day. So she would. As a kid, my mom would recite this one. The gum chewing Yank and the cud chewing cow, very alike, but different somehow. What is the difference? Ah, I've got it now. The intelligent look on the face of the cow.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

That's so good.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

But no, it's to the point Right. That the. A lot of these, what the evils are 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? Through these poems. Poems are doing all this work very much like.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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.

[Stephen Nissenbaum]

Before the visitor from St Nick, Christmas was celebrated in a very different way.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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 a day. 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.

[Stephen Nissenbaum]

It was commonly celebrated as what I would call something of a cross between Halloween and New Year's Eve because of what amounts to trick or treat. Bands of young men, most of them poor, 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.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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

[Stephen Nissenbaum]

We're talking about a small group of people who call themselves Knickerbockers 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.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

The Knickerbockers were a conservative organization trying to invent new American traditions and also great names for basketball teams. Go Knicks. And they found a figurehead for their new version of Christmas in St Nicholas of Myra, patron saint of merchants, bakers, brides, the falsely accused and children. In the 1820s, the lines between St Nicholas and the sort of scary figure of Sancta 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 1823 with the poem we've been talking about in this 542 words about a guy named St. 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.

[Stephen Nissenbaum]

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 grownups changing places with the kids. So the children have really replaced the working class in the new Christmas.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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 Jr. Had written the poem. But what if there was another approach? An ancestor of Mary Van Dusen's hit upon this idea that in a letter from the 1920s, 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 Jr. 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 foresee more 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 without documentary proof. The Livingstons needed to make a stylistic argument that this poem sounded like livingst and not like more and only someone of eminent literary attainments could really land it. The Livingstons would wait nearly 80 years until Mary Van Dusen came across that website, took up the family quest and found such a scholar at last.

[Mary Van Dusen]

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 him email and I said I have this problem, what do I do? And he said, you find Don when we're back.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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

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[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Week before Thanksgiving, the year 2000. 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.

[Don Foster]

It's great to be with you this evening.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

This is Don Foster. At the time, he was an English professor at Vassar. He's straight out of Central Casting. Blazer, 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.

[Don Foster]

My office is what you would expect an English professor's office to be. Piled high with student papers and with writings I have studied by poets and playwrights, some still unknown. But intermixed with the literary texts are others by felon zealots or nameless resentments whose identity or actions were of sufficient interest for someone to ask, who wrote this thing?

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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.

[Don Foster]

Professor, do you know that you're going to be on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow? And I said, well, no. Professor, do you know?

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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 statistical patterns could be detected in an author's work, Kind of like large language models now. 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 dishy 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 ly endings like vaguely. He used dashes to make compound words like triple, back over somersault and pander, pirouette. He liked zany adjectives, his prose thought. Foster revealed certain racial ideas. And all those signs pointed clearly to the journalist Joe Klein. Foster nailed it. Klein eventually fessed up. And this was when things started to get weird for the professor.

[Don Foster]

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, harassments were suddenly being sent to me and saying, can you figure out who wrote this?

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Soon Foster was teaching by day and by night Working the unabomber case, the JonBenet Ramsey case, the anthrax case. And few major news items of the late 1990s were beyond the literary forensics of Don Foster.

[Don Foster]

Monica Lewinsky wrote the three page document. So I now go back. Ask the question, did she really?

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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, Jr.

[Don Foster]

I got a phone call in August of 1999 from a woman who said that she thought that her ancestor wrote the night before Christmas, not Clement Clarke Moore.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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 1775 to 1830. In order to establish a documentary record. She put it all on a website, which ran ultimately to over 15,000 pages by her count, 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 St. Nicholas to other poems by Moore and Livingstone. Hundreds of thousands of words have been written on this subject, and we all have holidays 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 tetrameter, an extremely tedious matter. That, of course, is the only thing Malcolm wanted to talk about when I saw him.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Okay, 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 verse and satire called anapestic tetrameter.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

So rhythmically give me lines that show.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Da da dum, da da dum dum.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Da da dum, da da dum, da da dum, da da dum, da da dum.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

And you, as a parent might be familiar with this from like all of Dr. Seuss or like Horton hears a whole. On the 15th of May in the jungle of Nool, in the heat of the day, in the cool of the pool, he was splashing. And, you know, this kind of like. It trips off the tongue. An anapest is a line. It's two unstressed syllables and a stressed one. So it's da da dum, da da dum. That's like a da da dum. That's an anapest. Tetra. Tetra. From the Latin for four. It means there's four of those per line of an anapestic tetrameter. 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 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 Twas the Night Before Christmas is the Way I Am by Eminem.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, yeah.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Twas the night Before Christmas. And all through the house. You see, it's like it's, it's. It just like it hooks you in.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

So Foster alleged that Moore was way too serious to be a big anapaestic tetramiter guy. He says that Moore condemned the, quote, depraved taste in poetry of those who read anapestic satire, end quote. In essence, Livingston was way more likely to write an anapest than Moore, not least of all because he was just a really fun guy.

[Don Foster]

Here's a little sample of Henry Livingston's verse. This is where he closes one of his many Christmas and New Year's poems. But tis time that I bid you goodbye till next year by wishing you happiness, peace and good cheer. And he has kind of poem after poem after poem in this vein, many of them Christmas or New Year's poems.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Then he turns his attention to Clement Clarke Moore.

[Don Foster]

Clement Clarke 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. One might even say Grinch. He writes things like humble the praise and trifling the regard whichever weight upon the moral bard. And then he goes on to scold women for wearing cosmetics or to chastise children for being too noisy. Quite a severe man.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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 Jr. Fought for independence. Clement Moore was allegedly a slave owner. Livingston was a friend of the Indians, more 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 was Livingstone 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 long last, the press went wild. Finally tonight, the mystery of a visit from St. Nicholas. It has been a holiday tradition since 1822. But who really wrote the famous poem? He was in the New York Times twice. It was on network television.

[Okta Representative]

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.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Don Foster's arguments 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, has the jury reached a verdict? The jury naturally decided that the author was the night before Christmas us is Henry Linison Jr. This prompted the mayor of Troy to issue a proclamation, quote, that December 23, 2014 is Henry Livingston Jr. Day in Troy, New York. Famous musicians have reportedly announced on stage that Henry Livingston Jr. Is the real author of the poem. The freaking Poetry foundation website has a page for Henry Livingston Jr. Crediting him as the author of the poem. Unambiguously, this is not ubiquitous, but through Don Foster, Mary Van Dusen 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.

[Don Foster]

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

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Okta Representative]

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[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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[Sophie Cunningham]

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[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

A couple 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 and original prints of the Constitution hung on the wall. The Constitution I Have a dream. Twas the night before Christmas.

[Seth Kaller]

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 Clement C. Moore.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Kaller became embroiled in the authorship question.

[Seth Kaller]

And so a New York Times reporter called me and asked me about it and, you know, 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. By the dishonesty of the arguments made against Clement Moore. So I kept going even. Even after I thought this is sufficient to, you know, make the case.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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

[Seth Kaller]

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

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Kaller began to go through the claims in Don Foster's book, and he soon found that most of them were deeply suspicious. The comparable phraseology. That table confused me. Would you. Would you explain the origin of that table?

[Sophie Cunningham]

Yes.

[Seth Kaller]

Let me find it.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Kaller got out a binder stuffed with papers. Nobody is taking this matter lightly. In fact, we spent an entire afternoon going through this. But let's stick to the big ticket items today. First, style, Moore wouldn't write like this. But Kallor showed me a chart comparing parts of the poem with other poems Moore had written.

[Seth Kaller]

Here's another from another one of his writings. Twas an autumnal morn, celestial, bright, the all snug. And from something else, he's 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 another poem is, there are all these words, feelings, thoughts, phrases. These would all be evidence that Moore 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.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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.

[Seth Kaller]

But the fact that all the stories that the Livingstone family have told can be actually disproven, you know, oh, it was taken by a nanny. And then you prove that, well, the nanny wasn't there for another eight years.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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

[Seth Kaller]

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.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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 years after his book Author Unknown came out, he retracted his famous claim that Shakespeare had written the funeral elegy, undermounting skepticism. And after he wrote an article seeming to suggest an innocent government scientist was responsible for sending the anthrax letters. After September 11, he was sued for libel, settled for some undisclosed amount of money, and went back to being predominantly a Vassar 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 Clarke Moore that we, the staff of Revisionist History and associates in the rare documents trade, refused to leave unchallenged.

[Seth Kaller]

And his book Arthur Unknown is still referred to and still used by people who are looking into it. And then so many other reporters go with it as the story of 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 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 have to acknowledge that there was one. But you should not pretend that it's actually real.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

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 end to the mystery. It just wasn't the conclusion they'd hoped for.

[Mary Van Dusen]

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.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Ben, was there, was there one bit of evidence that, for you, really sealed the case?

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Yeah. This whole argument against Clement 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. Two effectively Christmas poems by Clement Clarke Moore that predate or are in tight sequence with a visit from St. Nicholas. So the first is a letter called from St. Nicholas, which is literally in the voice of Santa Claus to colonel Clarke 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 anabestic 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 St Nicholas were written at the same time. There was a snowstorm in New York on December 21st. It was a Saturday in 1822. I wrote 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 need their native green. And every breeze appears to stand all hushed to view the seam. You wonder how the snows were made a dance upon the air, as if from purer worlds they strayed so lightly and so fair. Perhaps they are the summer flowers and northern stars that bloom, wafted away from icy bowers to cheer our winter's gloom. Perhaps they're 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 fleeting vision teach truth. You soon must know that all the joys we here can reach are transient as the snow that says 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 Jr. Actually wrote this poem gets retold so often. It's another Christmassy 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 grandfather's forgotten role in inventing Christmas. I don't believe it. But then again, tis the season. Revisionist History is produced by me, Ben Nadif Haffrey with Nina Byrd Lawrence and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Fact Checking by Annika Robbins. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Production support from Luke Lamond. Engineering by David Herrmann at Good Studios and Nina Byrd Lawrence. Original music was composed, arranged and recorded by Luis Guerra. Mixing and mastering by Marcelo d'. Oliveira. 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 Melvilliana Blog, Tom Germany and Justin Fox to our friends in Troy, the incomparable Duncan Crary and city historian Kathy Sheehan. 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 McDonnell P. Jackson. Just be sure to read Scott Norsworthy's response to it on the Melvilliana Blog right after from Revisionist History. Happy holidays and we'll see you all in the New Year.

[Sophie Cunningham]

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[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

Thursday Night Football is on, and it's only on Prime Video.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Brilliant.

[Okta Representative]

Just brilliant.

[Ben Nadaff-Haffrey]

This week, the west coast action heats up when the Rams meet the Seahawks in a huge divisional showdown. Coverage begins at 7pm Eastern with football's best party, TNF Tonight, presented by Verizon. And don't miss the Broncos and Chiefs on Christmas night. It's Thursday Night Football only on Prime Video, not a prime member. Not a problem. Simply sign up for a 30 day free trial. Restrictions apply. See Amazon.com amazonprime for details.

[Sophie Cunningham]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.