Source: Mental Floss
It’s a literary mystery: Nearly 200 years after it was published in New York’s Troy Sentinel, we still don’t know who really wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”
When it first appeared in the newspaper on December 23, 1823, there was no name attached to it. It wasn’t until 13 years later that Clement Clarke Moore, a professor and poet, was named as the author.
A story emerged that a housekeeper had, without Moore’s knowledge, sent the piece—which he had written for his kids—to the newspaper, and in 1844, the poem was officially included in an anthology of Moore’s work.The problem? The family of Henry Livingston, Jr., claimed their father had been reciting “A Visit From St. Nicholas” to them for 15 years before it was published. Here’s the view from both sides.
Livingston’s Dutch background is a key component in this mystery. His mother was Dutch, and many references in the poem are as well. For example, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” is likely where we got the popular names for Santa’s reindeer—there seems to be no reference to their names prior to the poem. A couple of the names have skewed slightly over the years; instead of Donner and Blitzen, the latter two reindeer recited were called “Dunder” and “Blixem,” the Dutch words for “Thunder” and “Lightning.” (These days, the spellings have changed slightly to “donder” and “bliksem.”)
According to proponents of this hypothesis, Blixem first became Blixen to better rhyme with Vixen, and then, in 1844, Moore changed it to the more German Blitzen. Dunder would become Donder, and then, in the early 20th century, was changed to Donner to match Blitzen’s new German name. (Clement Moore proponents counter that the original editor of the poem may have altered the names to better fit a pseudo-Dutch framework, and Moore was simply changing them back to…
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