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Show did the moon-silhouetted fjce of a 19 tb century ; handyman inspire one of most famous poems? ... His eyes, how they twinkled! Hi dimples, how merry ! ' K.s cheeks were like roses, L .e like a cherry ! . H;S droll Utile mouth was drawn :p lie a bow, and the ' teard of chin was as white as the sr.ow . , ." From a famous poem, probably one of the mast cherished 'and well remembered remem-bered in all of the English !r.r:ace. Written almost 130 years sro by Clement Clark Moore, this poem helped create one of the great legendary le-gendary figures of all time, , the "plump and jolly old elf," Santa Claus (who up to that time was depicted as rather a gaunt and somber . St. Nicholas whose living prototype had been an obscure ob-scure ecclesiastic of the Fourth Century). There is no substantiated Tersion of how Dr. Moore got his idea for this image, s different from most of those prevailing. The actual image of Santa San-ta Claus, or St. Nicholas as Moore called him in the first version, may have come from the moon-silhouetted face of his handyman. Legend holds that it was on a sleigh ride over the row packed .New York streets of 1S22 as he and his handyman, Peter, went from the estate to Green- 1 ich Village to deliver Christmas presents. r i The famous lines were set down by Moore at a writing desk in his home located on a 90-acre tract in a New York City area still known as Chelsea, down on the lower West Side where the wholesale flower market now stands. At the tirrH?, Moore was a professor of Oriental languages lan-guages in the General Theological Theo-logical Seminary in New York. According to tradition, Moore read the poem to his children that Christmas Eve, although it seems more likely that the children chil-dren were already in bed by the time he finished writing the poem. He probably read it the next clay Christmas Day, 1322. But whenever he read it, the poem was an immediate success not only with his own children, but with others. oth-ers. Moore's "The Night Before Be-fore Christmas" earned him lasting fame. It eclipsed his important work in linguistic scholarship and it is fitting therefore that the famed ballad has now-been now-been translated into more than 50 languages. . 1 |