Christmas America. In America, interest in Christmas had been revived in the 1820s by several short stories by Washington Irving which appear in his "The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent." and "Old Christmas". Irving's stories depicted harmonious warm-hearted English Christmas festivities he experienced while staying in Aston Hall, Birmingham, England, that had largely been abandoned, and he used the tract "Vindication of Christmas" (1652) of Old English Christmas traditions, that he had transcribed into his journal as a format for his stories. In 1822, Clement Clarke Moore wrote the poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas" (popularly known by its first
Jolly Old Saint Nicholas Jolly Old Saint Nicholas "Jolly Old Saint Nicholas" is a Christmas song that originated with a poem by Emily Huntington Miller (1833-1913), published as "Lilly's Secret" in "The Little Corporal Magazine" in December 1865. The song's lyrics have also been attributed to Benjamin Hanby, who wrote a similar song in the 1860s, Up on the Housetop. However, the lyrics now in common use closely resemble Miller's 1865 poem. The music has been attributed to John Piersol McCaskey, a school principal and former Mayor of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who claimed to have written the song in 1867. The "Johnny" mentioned in the