A Christmas Trifle
By Henry J. Stern
Tuesday, December 24, 2002
This article has relatively little to do with New York City government, so be warned.
It deals with poetry, history, philosophy and intellectual property. It is timely, because if you read this today, tomorrow is Christmas (if not, don’t worry about the anachronism). Anyone who is dissatisfied at the end will receive a full refund, and should read Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, but skip the ending.
‘Tis the day before Christmas. Tonight is celebrated in a classic American poem. The B and E trains this morning at rush hour were different, they were only half full, with plenty of seats. The incoming e-mails were fewer than usual, and it looks like many New Yorkers are taking a slightly longer winter holiday. This year, Christmas inconveniently fell on a Wednesday, so there was no automatic additional day to create a long weekend. In a rush of sentimentality, I decided to look up, and possibly reprint so people could read and share with their children, America’s classic Christmas poem, now in the public domain. The poem is still so popular that it is reprinted today in both the Daily News and the New York Post.
When Ginger Nut, the factotum of New York Civic, went to the Internet to get a copy of the poem for us to hyperlink, we learned that some scholars now attribute the work to Major Henry Livingston, Jr. (1748-1828), and not Clement Clarke Moore, the man who was supposed to have written it for the last century and a half. You can read the ballad, followed by a discussion of its authorship, by clicking St. Nicholas.
As a former Parks Commissioner, I was intrigued by this issue because, during my tenure, two parks were named for Moore, in great part because of his literary ability. One is located at the southeast corner of 22nd Street and 10th Avenue, in Chelsea. The other is in Queens, south of Broadway and north of Woodside Avenue, between 79th and 82nd Streets. That area is the site of the Clement Clarke Moore Homestead (the family's abode after the Native Americans left the neighborhood).
If Livingston is the real author of the poem, that means the Rev. Moore stole the credit, for he claimed, years after its first anonymous appearance in the Troy Sentinel in 1823, that he wrote it for his two daughters, Margaret and Charity. If that is true, should such a man be honored by not one but two city parks? Dr. Martin Luther King and Raoul Wallenberg have multiple parks named for them, but hardly anyone else. The usual rule is one per person.
This is a matter that the newly revitalized City Council could consider, since they have the power to name streets and parks. Hopefully they will be guided by the recommendation of the capable new Parks Commissioner and the Parks Historian. Whoever wrote it, the poem itself is vulnerable under current notions of separation of church and state and political correctness In the view of science, the poem is most unlikely to be literally true. Although the gender of the reindeer is not disclosed, a name like ‘Vixen’ would be difficult to bestow today. Clyde Haberman, the Times’columnist who most nearly has the wonderful skills of Russell Baker, writes today on the identity of Christmas as a religious, secular or forbidden holiday. Click Clyde. He too writes of Major Livingston, but my source was the Internet which I read before I was aware of his column, so I am not guilty of Rev. Moore’s alleged sin.
The charge against Moore may well be false, or, more charitably, incorrect, because one aspect of modern (or post-modern) deconstructionism is that whatever is widely believed is unlikely to be true. Park documents, all from impeccable tertiary sources, support Moore’s claim of authorship. If you like, you can read the historical signs erected on these properties by clicking history. In the eight years from 1994 to 2001, Parks staff, interns and volunteers put up over 2000 of these historical signs, a practice which Commissioner Adrian Benepe and his staff have continued. In fact, he is the author of many of the existing signs because he writes so well. When, many, many years from now, he is no longer Commissioner, I hope he becomes a blogger.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
Henry J. Stern is the director of NYCivic.