Alright, dear reader, I suppose it’s time to officially switch into Christmas gear for a couple of days, so here we go:

As my young and historically benighted reader might not know, Christmas in the 19th century was a very different thing than what we have now.  No Santa, no reindeer, none of that horseshit.  What changed?

It’s December 22, 1823.  The world is a grimy, pre-industrial smudge-pot of coal dust and dreadful hygiene.  Christmas, to the extent that it’s even a thing, is a muddled affair of stern religious observance mixed with a bit of wassailing-adjacent public drunkenness.  The idea of a jolly, fat man delivering toys is about as plausible as a steam-powered unicorn.  St. Nicholas is still some gaunt, vaguely terrifying Turkish ghost bishop, not a cookie-addled home invader with a branding deal.

Then, some ink-stained wretch at the Troy Sentinel in upstate New York, likely fueled by bad whiskey and the bleakness of a Tuesday, decided to run a poem.  Anonymously.  Because of course.  You don’t sign your name to something so patently deranged.  It was less poetry and more hallucinatory fever dream printed on newsprint, a piece of pure, uncut narrative insanity that would, against all odds, hijack an entire holiday.

As one who has always cherished and aspired to the societal role of writer as cultural terrorist, I say with certainty that “A Visit from St. Nicholas” is the single most effective piece of cultural propaganda ever deployed.  Before this poem dropped, our conception of Santa was a chaotic mess.  But after?  Bam.  Instant fat-guy-in-a-red-suit consensus.  This anonymous screed built the character of Santan from the ground up, bolt by bloody bolt.  It dictated the whole damn scene: the sleigh, the eight tiny named reindeer.  Before this, did anyone think to call a flying ungulate “Vixen”?  No.  It’s genius.  It’s the kind of specific, world-building detail that worms its way into the collective brainstem and just stays.

The poem itself is a masterclass in lexical precision, sort of a high-velocity descriptive barrage.  The narrator, roused from a “long winter’s nap,” witnesses a whole psychotropic tableau unfold on his lawn.  It goes beyond a “jolly old elf.”  The text insists on a near-forensic level of detail.  The twinkle in his eye, the dimples, the cherry nose, the beard “as white as the snow.”  And the stump of a pipe held tight in his teeth, the smoke encircling his head “like a wreath.”  He’s not described as a saint but a hard-living, possibly Dutch, magical trucker with a serious tobacco habit and a bottomless sack of contraband.  He is a “right jolly old elf,” a creature of pure, unadulterated joy who laughs with a belly that shakes “like a bowlful of jelly.”

This portly specter doesn’t just arrive; he comes in “with a bound.”  He works fast, a blur of fur and soot, filling stockings with a twitch of his wrist, a creature of pure, libidinal efficiency.  He’s like Seal Team Six.  He’s all business.  No small talk, no bullshit.  Just a quick nod, a finger laid aside his nose, and then – poof – up the chimney like a bat out of hell.  The closing lines, “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night,” aren’t a gentle blessing; they’re a mic drop.  A declaration of a new world order delivered from the seat of a flying sleigh, disappearing into the cold, indifferent sky.

The poem is a Trojan horse of holiday mythmaking.  You read it thinking you’re getting a cozy fireside ditty, but what you’re actually getting is a full-scale cultural operating system update.  The whole thing is engineered – whether consciously or not – to be repeated, recited, reprinted, and ritualized until it becomes indistinguishable from the holiday itself.

And we certainly complied.

We recited it in classrooms with the same solemnity usually reserved for national anthems.  We printed in on greeting cards, stitched it onto pillows, slapped it onto department-store displays.  We let it take over our Decembers until the poem wasn’t a poem anymore – it was the blueprint for an entire season of sanctioned madness.

For decades, the authorship was a literary mystery.  Clement Clarke Moore, a stuffy academic, eventually claimed it, but the family of a Dutch-descended dude named Henry Livingston Jr. screamed bloody murder, insisting their guy wrote it.  Personally, I think authorship is a very big deal, but most seem to think the mystery is an essential part of the power of the poem.  They argue the point isn’t the author, but rather the blast radius.  This anonymous poem, slipped into a provincial newspaper, became the foundational text for the modern commercial-religious-industrial complex we call Christmas.  It’s one of the most reprinted poems in the language, not because it’s high art, but because it’s a perfect machine.  It did its job with such terrifying competence that we’re all still living inside its weird, sugary, reindeer-powered world, more than 200 years later.  You can’t escape it.  It’s in the air.  It’s in the goddamn malls.  It’s the ghost in the machine.  And it all started on a Tuesday, with a little bit of anonymous ink.

N.P.: “Forsaken” – Adam Hurst