A Visit from St. Nicholas my children," Moore claimed the Christmas poem in this 1844 letter as his "literary property, however small the intrinsic value of that property may be." "A Visit from St. Nicholas" appears on pages 124-127 in Moore's volume of collected Poems (New York: Bartlett and Welford, 1844). Before 1844, the poem was included in two 1840 anthologies: attributed to "Clement C. Moore" in Selections from The American Poets, edited by William Cullen Bryant (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1840), pages 285-286; and to "C. C. Moore" in the first volume of The Poets of America, edited by John Keese (New York:
Saint Nicholas in Bari are said to exude a miraculous watery substance known as "manna" or "myrrh", which some members of the faithful regard as possessing supernatural powers. Very little at all is known about Saint Nicholas's historical life. Any writings Nicholas himself may have produced have been lost and he is not mentioned by any contemporary chroniclers. This is not surprising, since Nicholas lived during . Furthermore, all written records were kept on papyrus or parchment, which were less durable than modern paper, and texts needed to be periodically recopied by hand onto new material in order to be preserved. The