Popularly known as “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” or “The Night Before Christmas,” the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” is responsible for inventing or popularizing many of the most familiar features of the Santa Claus legend. It was composed one snowy evening by Clement Clark Moore, a professor of literature at Columbia…OR WAS IT? Controversy as to the true author of the poem rages to this day; the most likely alternative candidate is Henry Livingston, Jr. a farmer and former military man with a habit of anonymously publishing poems in anapestic meter. Obviously, this is a much more important and engrossing literary mystery than the so-called “Shakespeare authorship question” (totally made-up: Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare).

We’re following the traditional attribution of the poem to Moore, but if you ask us when we’ve had some peppermint schnapps, we’ll join Poetry Foundation and Don Foster (the Vassar prof famous for doing word-frequency analysis on literary texts) in giving Livingston the credit.