Today Is...A Visit from St. Nicholas Published

Christmas was not miraculously handed down as a fully formed holiday, complete with wrapped gifts and blinking lights, rather it is a rich tapestry woven from countless sources, one of which is the Clement Clarke Moore poem 'A Visit from St. Nicholas' or 'Twas the Night Before Christmas' as it is more famously known.
It was printed anonymously today in 1823 in the New York Sentinel under the title 'Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas' and it was anonymous because the author was the son of the head of the Episcopal Diocese of New York and the churchy set were not keen on Christmas being anything other than about Jesus and Saint Nicholas so anything popularising the festive season which didn't include a baby in a manger or a Saint clambering up on roofs to throw money into prostitutes socks was frowned upon.
Clement Clark Moore wrote the poem to amuse his children and was never meant for publication but a friend submitted it to the newspaper and it was picked up by the Saint Nicholas Society who used it in their cause to to make Christmas, which was more of a feeding frenzy and drunken orgy, more child friendly and put together his eight reindeer with their Sinterklaas and a legend was born.
The idea of Santa's sleigh being pulled by a reindeer is based on another poem, 'Old Santeclaus with Much Delight' but he gave him eight and named them Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Dunder and Blixem although over time the last two became Donner and Blitzen and then later another one called Rudolph was added to the gang.
He referred to Saint Nicholas all the way through, never Santa or Father Christmas, and even called him a jolly old elf at one point but as a professor of classics, up until that point his most notable work was a two-volume tome entitled 'A Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language' and nobody remembers that but they remember the poem he dashed off in half hour in an effort to shut the kids up one night.