MacDonald P. Jackson the New Zealand Academy of the Humanities (FNZAH). In 2009 he was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (FRSNZ). Jackson's most recent work was a year long examination of the disputed authorship of the classic poem "The Night Before Christmas", also called "A Visit from St. Nicholas." Jackson applied modern computational stylistics techniques to the corpora of verse left by both claimants, Clement Clarke Moore and Henry Livingston Jr., including a new test, statistical analysis of phonemes. His book, "Who Wrote" ""The Night Before Christmas"?" identifies the true author and makes a significant contribution to the
Saint Nicholas Apollonius of Tyana", an eight-volume biography of him written in the early third century by the Greek writer Philostratus. Christian storytellers were known to adapt older pagan legends and attribute them to Christian saints. Because Apollonius's hometown of Tyana was not far from Myra, it is highly probable that many popular stories about him became attached to Saint Nicholas. Accounts of Saint Nicholas's life agree on the essence of his story, but modern historians disagree regarding how much of this story is actually rooted in historical fact. Traditionally, Nicholas was born in the city of Patara (Lycia et Pamphylia), a