'Twas the Night Before Christmas (1977 TV special) 'Twas the Night Before Christmas (1977 TV special) Twas the Night Before Christmas is a Christmas television special loosely inspired by the 1823 poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" by Clement Clarke Moore. It first aired December 7, 1977 on ABC. Directed by Tim Kiley, it stars Paul Lynde, Anne Meara, Martha Raye, and Alice Ghostley. The story is set on Christmas Eve in a New England town in the late 1890s. The Cosgrove family's home is in an uproar over the holidays. The patriarch, Clark Cosgrove (Paul Lynde) is frazzled by the gift demands of his loud children. His
Clement Moore Butler was thereafter chaplain to the United States minister at Rome, Italy, and the second rector of Grace Church (now St. Paul’s Within the Walls) in Rome (1861–1864). When Butler returned to the United States in 1864, he became professor of ecclesiastical history at the Divinity School of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Philadelphia, until 1884 when he retired due to ill health. Butler died on March 5, 1890, in Germantown, Pennsylvania. In 1836 Butler married Frances Livingston Hart (1816–1895) in Washington, DC. They had three children: Frances Livingston Butler, Helen Moore Butler and Clement Moore Butler. Frances was a niece of