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:
A Visit from St. Nicholas for whom he had originally written the piece. Moore's conception of Saint Nicholas was borrowed from his friend Washington Irving, but Moore portrayed his "jolly old elf" as arriving on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. At the time that Moore wrote the poem, Christmas Day was overtaking New Year's Day as the preferred genteel family holiday of the season, but some Protestants viewed Christmas as the result of "Catholic ignorance and deception" and still had reservations. By having Saint Nicholas arrive the night before, Moore "deftly shifted the focus away from Christmas Day with its still-problematic religious associations." As