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
Saint Nicholas Nicholas to the count of Flanders, which he then enshrined in the Abbey of Watten. According to legend, in 1101, Saint Nicholas appeared in a vision to a French clerk visiting the shrine at Bari and told him to take one of his bones with him to his hometown of Port, near Nancy. The clerk took a finger bone back with him to Port, where a chapel was built to Saint Nicholas. Port became an important center of devotion in the Nicholas cult and, in the fifteenth century, a church known as the Basilique Saint-Nicolas was built there dedicated to