A Visit From Saint Nicholas"A Visit from St. Nicholas", more commonly known as "The Night Before Christmas" and "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" from its first line, is a poem first published anonymously in 1823 and later attributed to Clement Clarke Moore, who claimed authorship in 1837. The poem has been called "arguably the best known verses ever written by an American" and is largely responsible for some of the conceptions of Santa Claus from the mid nineteenth century to