Troy, New York, December 23, 1823. When the Sentinel ran some jaunty holiday verses captioned "Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas," not even the paper's editor, Orville Holley, knew whom to thank, or guessed that this poem was destined for greatness. Submitted anonymously, it was not by one of Holley's regular contributors. Resisting the oblivion to which most nineteenth-century newspaper verse was quickly consigned, "The Night Before Christmas" (as it came to be called) reappeared in the New York Spectator only nine days after its Troy debut, in a text borrowed from the Sentinel, then in New Jersey and Pennsylvania almanacs for the 1825 calendar year, next in a literary magazine called The Casket, in 1826. A few years later, when the New York Morning Courier reprinted it, the now popular ditty of Saint Nicholas was said by some to have been written by Clement Clarke Moore, a Bible professor at New York's General Theological Seminary. That rumor was reinforced fifteen years later with the publication of Moore's Poems. By the time he died in 1863, aged eighty-four, Clement Clarke Moore was known from coast to coast as the father of Santa Claus, an accomplishment for which his name has been revered ever since. But there are people in my town of Poughkeepsie, mostly persons of Dutch descent, who are unhappy with Professor Moore for having laid claim to "Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas." In fact, certain local historians feel so strongly about this issue that they would like to see Saint Nicholas in heaven take Clement Clarke Moore onto his own reverend lap, flip him over, and let the man have it on the bottom with "the birchen rod" for which Saint Nicholas was once famous.

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I found it truly remarkable how much information was stored inside their heads [Mrs. Eileen Hayden and Mrs. Bernice Thomas, experts on local history from the Dutchess County Historical Society]. In a municipality whose official motto is "Poughkeepsie: 300 Years of People, Pride, and Progress," there is a lot of history to know, and these two women know it like no one else, in minute detail, from the first Dutch settler right on through to the First or even Second World War. But Mary Van Deusen and I were here to ask about "The Night Before Christmas."

Mrs Hayden and Mrs. Thomas delivered their verdict crisply, with complete authority, and without hesitation: "That poem," they said, "was written by Major Henry Livingston Junior."

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Eliza and Charles, the Major's two eldest children by his second wife, Jane, said that their father wrote and recited the poem for Christmas of 1807 or '08, beating the Troy Sentinel text by as much as sixteen years. (One grandson reports from his father, Sidney, an even earlier date of 1805.)

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You can't read Major Henry Livinngston Jr. and not love the man from the top of his jolly head to the tips of his Poughkeepsie feet. His correspondence and published poems and articles are usually witty, sometimes hilarious, never sarcastic, full of love for humanity and driven by an irrepressible joie de vivre -- or, to say it more properly in Dutch, levenslust.

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The world, as represented in Professor Moore's Poems, is a place inhabited by loud children, frivolous maids, scolding wives, loud children, lazy mechanics, loud children, soft-spoken rogues, rude barflies, lewd coquettes and prostitutes, rich men ill-clad, loud children, dull schoolmen, manly-treading female would-be-scholars, and loud children - all of whom must be scolded: the little ones, with patience, and the adults, who ought to know better, with sneering sarcasm.

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It would be hard to find two sons of the American Revolution more different from each other than Professor Clement Clarke Moore of Chelsea House, Manhattan, and Major Henry Livingston of Locust Grove, Poughkeepsie. There is no topic about which the two men can be found to agree, from women to music to politics. Moore opposed most democratic reforms, including the movement for free public schools; Livingston argued that children should have equality opportunity, regardless of their gender or complexion or cultural heritage. A foe to women's education, Moore protected his daughters from the harmful effects of book learning, and speaks of learned women with scathing derision; Livingston, while traveling through Canada in 1775, praised the women's zeal for education while critizing the illiteracy of the Canadian men. Moore expresses disdain for the American "savages" and condemns their mode of communication as innately deceitful; Livingston was a friend of the Indians, writes of the aboriginal peoples with admiration, and praises the seriousness and courtesy of their speech. Moore unrepetantly defends human slavery as an institution ordained by god for the health and prosperity of American society - in fact, he owned slaves himself, as many as were convenient to keep the Moore household running smoothly; Livingston in his published journalism as early as 1788 calls for emanicipation, and writes in his private journal that "A land of slaves will ever be a land of Poverty, Ignorance, & Idleness!" The son of a British loyalist during the War for Independence, Moore as an adult denounced thomas Jefferson as a subverter of public morals and a danger to the Commonwealth; Livingston was a die-hard Whig whose lifelong theme, in verse and prose, is that "Love, and all its delectable concomitants" can thrive only "where equality is found or understood."

The personal dispositions of Livingston and Moore were as different as their systems of belief. Major Henry celebrates theater, music, and dancing, which combine "to drive far off care and annihilate time / And chase sour sadness away." Moore writes that the man who dances is "like a squirrel cag'd, who, though he bound, / And whirl about his wheel, yet ne'er advances." Women dancers are said to resemble female scholars and prostitutes: "No laws they heed but those which rule the dance."

Santa's pipe - removed from the poem by some recent editors under pressure from the anti-tobacco lobby - is unmistably Dutch: "The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth, / And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath." As early as 1748, Tobias Smollett writes of a Dutch sailor taking "a whiff of tobacco from the stump of a pipe." Henry Livingston's imagination is similarly populated by Dutchmen who "puff away care" with a "pipe of Virginia" while Clement Moore likens the lure of tobacco ("Virginia's weed," he calls it) to "opium's treach'rous aid."

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Or take the simple word all -- which can be used either as a pronoun, to mean every person or every thing ("All of the children were snug") or as an adverb, to mean totally ("The child was all snug"). Most writers use all as a pronoun more often than as an adverb, but the "Christmas" poet does not. In the poem's first line, it's "all through the house" (not throughout). In line 5 he writes, "all snug in their beds" (not snugly or so snug). These examples are followed in turn by "dressed all in fur" and "all tarnished." that's a lot of adverbial "all" for one short poem. Against those four adverbs are five pronouns: "dash away all," "fill'd all the stockings," "all flew," "Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night." Vintage Henry: in Livingston's early verse, and in Livingston's late verse, and in his verse in between, the pronouns and adverbs are about evenly divided. In Moore's poetry, the pronouns outnumber the adverbs 10 to 1 (and in Moore's prose, by more than 100 to 1). Henry writes "all along," "all blithe," "all blue," "all craggy," "all defenseless," "all delightful," "all early," "all flaming," "all forlorn," "all-hid," "all keen," all this or that, all through the alphabet.

It's worth tracing the history of this quaint phrase, "all snug" -- which is common today as "Tuck me in!" but less familiar in the days of Livingston and Moore. By writing "all snug," the author of "The Night Before Christmas" was using an idiom more common in Scotland and Ireland than in England or America. Turning to the Oxford English Dictionary, one learns that "all snug" or "right snug" at first meant all tiday, the earliest recorded instance of which is in 1725, in Allan Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd: "He kames his hair, indeed, and gaes right snug." Great Scot! Allan Ramsay was one of Henry Livingston's favorite poets. The Major even perfomred Ramsay's poems, set to music, on his flute and violin.

The Oxford English Dictionary reports that "snug" later came to mean not only tidy (as in Ramsay) but cozy or comfortable. As the earliest instance of "snug" for cozy, the OED cites Christopher Anstey, The New Bath Guide (1766), a poem already idnetified as a major influence on both Henry Livingston and on the author of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (see OED, "snug," ad. 1, ad. 2). For additional examples, I turned to Literature Online -- an archive described by the publisher as a "fully searchable library of more than 260,000 works of english and American poetry, drama, and prose" -- and found that the second earliest instance of "all snug" appears in John O'Keeffe's libretto The Highland Reel (1789). That's of interest as well: the two latest items in Henry Livingston's music book (1776-1784) are from John O'Keeffe (Amo Amas," and "Can I declare" [1784], p.52). Henry Livingston and the author of "The Night Before Christmas" display remarkably similar reading habits.

Henry Livingston is not the only poet who might have written "all snug." In 1801, Matthew Lewis published in his Tales of Terror, a book of scary bedtime stories for children, one of which is called "The Wolf-King; or Little Red-Riding-Hood," in which a big, bad wolf-king dons Grandma's nightcap and gets "all snug" in her bed while hoping that the plump little gal int eh red suit will soon be there." The same early-American dad who wrote "The Night Before Christmas" for his children quite possible read to them in 1808 from Lewis's Tales of Terror. No one poet had a monopoly on such phrases. But Henry Livingston and the "Christmas" poet not only adopted the same words and phrasing; their respective poems were indebted, directly or indirectly, to the identical poets (including, I think, Allan Ramsay, Michael Drayton, Christopher Anstey, William King, John O'Keeffe, and Matthew Lewis, none of them poets who influenced Clement Moore).

Of all the poems and letters and magazine articles that Henry Livingston wrote during his eighty years on the planet, the earliest to survive begins with the greeting "A happy Christmas to my dear Sally Welles." "A Visit from St. Nicholas" ends with the greeting "Happy Christmas to all." One might guess that a "happy" Christmas, which today sounds quite ordinary, was as commonplace in Livingston's time as a "merry" Christmas, but the guess would be wrong. Literature Online, for example, locates the earliest "Happy Christmas" in 1823 in a little poem beginning "'Twas the night before Christmas..." A broader survey of English and American literature, from 1390 ("murie Cristes masse") through the Christmas of 1823, shows that "Merry Christmas" was commonplace and "Happy Christmas" rare. Charles Fenno Hoffman, who ascribed the poem to Moore, changed "Christmas" to "New Year" at lines 1 and 56. Other editors changed the last line of "A Visit" to read "Merry Christmas to all..." Many later editors followed suit, as if "Happy Christmas" were a mistake. But a "Happy Christmas!" sounded just fine to Henry Livingston.

Whether Clement Moore preferred a "Merry Christmas" or a "Happy Christmas" cannot be determined. From what I've seen of his extant writing in verse and prose, including personal correspondence, Moore never said "Happy Christmas" (or "Merry Christmas") to anyone.

"The Night Before Christmas" is as different from Moore's other children's verse as Christmas cookies from steamed spinach. The 1844 Poems includes three other poems (besides "Christmas") addressed to Moore's children. In one, he urges his little ones to look on his portrait and remember him after he lies mould'ring in the tomb. In the second, he urges the children to look on the freshly fallen snow and remember that they, too, and their transient joys, must perish from the earth. In "The Pig and the Rooster," written about 1833, Moore allegorizes a "conceited young rooster" and a "lazy young pig" (a fashion-monger and a wine-bibbing glutton), and a "counselor owl" (who despises them both). Moore's supporters always point to the form of this anapestic "Pig and Rooster" fable as evidence that the Professor really was capable of writing a children's poem like "A Visit from St. Nicholas," Major Livingston's heirs point to the content as evidence that he couldn't have. Major Livingston's heirs are right.

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One well-kept secret - unknown, evidently, even to the Professor's many biographers - is that Clement Moore as a young bechelor published many of his poems under the pseudonym "L." In 1844, when publishing his collected Poems under his own name, not under his youthful pseudonym, the Professor must have been disappointed in the response: reviews of his Poems ranged from sarcasm to tepid praise. But one reviewer, writing for The Churchman, the magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church of America, gave Clement Moore's Poems a ringing endorsement, a review suitable for framing. I don't know for sure who wrote it, but the author of that flattering Churchman blurb signs himself "L." Perhaps the old Professor wasn't humorless after all. Perhaps he even wrote his own book review.

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On January 16, the Poughkeepsie Journal published a corrupt text of "A Visit from St. Nicholas or Santa Claus," ascribed to no one; and on February 29, Henry slipped away. He was buried by the wife and children and friends he loved, beneath a grove of locust trees he loved, beside the river he loved. An obitary in the Journal, unsigned, describes him as "a great lover of the fine arts, and particularly fond of poetry and painting. His best qualities, however, shone in the domestic circle, over which his tender feelings, his warm affections, and his sprightly and instructive conversation shed uncommon interest and lovliness." Sixteen years later, a wealthy stranger, a scholar named Clement Clarke Moore, would lay claim to "A Visit from St. Nicholas." No matter. Henry Livingston gave to his children, and neighbors and friends and readers, much that could not be taken away. Compared to such an extraordinary life, "A Visit from St. Nicholas" is indeed a "trifle," just as Dr. Clement Clarke Moore had said it was. Henry Livingston was the spirit of Christmas itself.