No one knows who wrote ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas’

Found this on another site:

Virtually everyone who celebrates Christmas is familiar with the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” aka “Twas the Night Before Christmas.”

Believe it or not, the origin of this poem has some mystery attached to it. For many years, no one knew who wrote it.

“A Visit from St. Nicholas” was sent anonymously to the Sentinel, a newspaper in Troy, New York, and first published on December 23, 1823. The poem proved enormously popular, but the author’s identity was unknown.

Finally, in 1844, a professor named Clement Clarke Moore claimed credit for writing the poem, which had been sent to the Sentinel by one of Moore’s friends.

The story goes that Moore was hesitant to take credit for the poem because he was embarrassed by it and considered it unscholarly. However, some historians do not believe Moore was the actual author.

A professor named Donald Wayne Foster presented compelling evidence in 2000 that the real author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” was actually Henry Livingston Jr., who died in 1828. Foster believed the poem bore a striking resemblance to Livingston’s other writings, but was a strange anomaly in Moore’s body of work.

Some called Moore a sour, unsentimental individual and asserted that “A Visit from St. Nicholas” did not fit his persona, but other historians disagree.

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence in favor of Livingston is that the names of Santa’s last two reindeer in the poem were originally “Dunder” and “Blixem” and only became “Donder” and “Blitzen” because of a printer’s error.

Many years later, Moore wrote out copies of his poem, but committed the same mistake by writing “Donder” and “Blitzen.” The words “Dunder and Blixem” are actually Dutch for “thunder and lightning.”

Moore spoke no Dutch, but Livingston did. Still, after two centuries, the debate rages on about who really wrote “Twas the Night Before Christmas.”