5 Myths about Christmas

December 21, 2011, By Jack Heffron 2 comments

Jack Heffron

In keeping with our own holiday tradition of supplying you with conversation-starters you can spring during lulls at family get-togethers, we offer a handful of common misconceptions about Christmas. 

To keep this discussion as politically and ecclesiastically neutral as possible, we'll focus on the secular and cultural holiday celebrated—or at least acknowledged—by most faiths and ethnic backgrounds in America.  As with most of our holidays, mystery and misinformation, as well as controversy, pervade Christmas. Here are five. 

1. 'Twasn't the Night Before Christmas

Most of us learned the basic Santa story from this classic poem, which actually is titled "A Visit from St. Nicholas." But the misnomers about the poem only begin with the title. The biggest one is the controversy over who actually wrote it. Published anonymously by a newspaper in Troy, New York, in 1823, "A Visit from St. Nicholas" laid the foundation for many Christmas traditions that didn't exist beforehand, such as St. Nick being jolly, fat, dressed in fur and conveyed by flying reindeer that waited on the roof while he whisked down the chimney.

This article in the "Boston Globe" provides the basics of the authorship argument. Though it has simmered in certain circles for well over a century, the controversy sparked to a brighter flame back in 2000 when literary scholar Don Foster put forth in his book "Author Unknown" the theory that Clement Clarke Moore's claim to authorship of the poem was fraudulent, and that a gentleman farmer and poet named Henry Livingston Jr., wrote it. Moore made his claim a decade after Livingston's death, but the latter's children have refuted that claim pretty much since then.

The "New York Times" examined Foster's theory at length. It seems that Moore was more like Scrooge than Santa—a gruff, humorless gent, known for his harsh opinions and unlikely to have penned such a whimsical tale. Livingston, however, was quite the bon vivant, known for a twinkling eye every bit a match for the Jolly Old Elf himself. Through in-depth textual analysis, Foster creates a convincing case; Moore, however, has his own share of scholars lined up behind him, and all evidence on both sides is circumstantial. The only point that all share is that we never will know who actually did write the poem. We do know that it changed Christmas in America forever.