Line #12 Literature/TwasTheNightBeforeChristmas


1	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/a_visit_from_st_nicholas_thomas_nast.jpg]]
2	[[caption-width-right:350:Illustration from an 1864 edition by Thomas Nast.]]
3
4	->''[[TitleDrop [='=]Twas the night before Christmas]],\
5	When all thro' the house,\
6	Not a creature was stirring,\
7	Not even a mouse...''
8	-->--The poem's opening lines
9
10	Originally titled (and also known as) ''A Visit from St. Nicholas'', this 1823 poem -- first published anonymously but subsequently attributed to the American Episcopalian scholar Clement Clarke Moore -- is about one household's, well, [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin visit from St. Nicholas]].
11
12	A perennial favorite for [[ChristmasSpecial Christmastime reading]], the poem is considered the TropeCodifier for a lot of the popular imagery of SantaClaus, up to and including his reindeer and their names.[[note]]The TropeMaker for the creation of the specific American depiction of Santa is thought to be Creator/WashingtonIrving's satire ''[[ShortTitleLongElaborateSubtitle A History of New York, From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty]]'', also known as ''[[OfficiallyShortenedTitle Knickerbocker's History of New York]]'', though Santa himself (or rather, the archetype of what would later be known as "Santa Claus") is believed to be [[OlderThanTheyThink much]] ''[[OlderThanFeudalism much]]'' [[OlderThanFeudalism older]][[/note]] Being such an iconic work, it has also been {{parod\|y}}ied and spoofed enough to merit its own trope: TheParodyBeforeChristmas. (Funnily enough, the poem itself features a fat smoking caricature of St. Nicholas, so it's basically a SpoofingSpoofiness situation.) A related spoof is for somebody to mix up the names of the eight reindeer in particular; that's DasherDancerPrancerAndNixon.
13
14	[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upuUV_TdmtM Here it is]] as read by none other than the trumpet master Music/LouisArmstrong, himself.
15
16	----
17	!! The poem contains the following tropes:
18
19	* AdaptationDistillation: The poem crystallizes a number of ideas about St. Nicholas first found in Creator/WashingtonIrving[='s=] ''Knickerbocker History of New York''.
20	* AntiquatedLinguistics: The archaic word "ere" (meaning "before") is sometimes updated to "as", despite that changing the meaning a bit.
21	* BigFun: St. Nicholas has "a broad face, and a little round belly / That shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly."
22	* BilingualBonus: Santa's last pair of reindeer are named Donner and Blitzen, German for "thunder" and "lightning", respectively.
23	* ChariotPulledByCats: Santa Claus flies around on a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer, an image that has endured in the Santa Claus mythos.
24	* ChristmasElves: St Nick ''himself'' is referred to as an "elf" here, making this debatably the UrExample.
25	* DasherDancerPrancerAndNixon: Even the UrExample here is not immune from [[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-donner-partys-over/ confusion about the reindeers' names]]. The [[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Visit_From_St_Nicholas_-_Troy_Sentinel.png#/media/File:A_Visit_From_St_Nicholas_-_Troy_Sentinel.png original printing]] identified the final two reindeer as "Dunder and Blixem" (Dutch in English spelling for "Thunder and Lightning"). The first anthologized printing, however, corrected them to "Donder and Blixen", supposedly to make it closer to the German spelling of the same words (and perhaps to improve the rhyme with "Vixen"). Clement Moore adopted the second spelling in the later anthology published under his own name. However, the closely related actual German words for thunder and lightning are "Donner" and "Blitzen," leading to those reindeers' names being changed even more in some later editions.
26	* EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: It has elements that were dropped for later versions of the Santa Mythology:
27	** The man himself is never referred to as "Santa Claus," just as "St Nicholas."
28	** St Nick's described as being an elf himself here, whereas most later adaptations of Santa appear to be a human who employs [[ChristmasElves a rather gnomish race of elf seemingly unique to the North Pole]].
29	** He's said to "dress in all fur, from his head to his foot," whereas modern Santa wears a bright red overcoat with white fur trimmings. When was the last time you saw an animal with bright red fur?
30	** His sleigh and reindeer are described as "miniature" and "tiny" respectively, whereas with modern Santa they're almost universally depicted as normal-sized.
31	** The sleigh doesn't fly through the air in this poem; rather it's pulled on the ground until it reaches the house (the narrator hears it arrive "out on the lawn"), at which point it levitates to the roof.
32	** Also, Rudolph is of course not present, this work having been written more than a century prior to [[Literature/RudolphTheRedNosedReindeer his introduction]].
33	** St Nick actually originally said "''Happy'' Christmas to all" in the original version.
34	* FirstPersonPeripheralNarrator: The narrator is the husband and father of the family, who watches St Nick coming and going.
35	* HaveAGayOldTime: The original publication contained the line "The moon, on the breast of the newfallen snow..." In later printings this tends to get {{bowdlerise}}d to "crest."
36	* HollywoodDarkness: Played with. "The moon on the crest of the newfallen snow / Gave a lustre of midday to objects below."
37	* SantaClaus: Who did you expect? The EasterBunny?
38	* SecretMessageWink: "A wink of his eye and a twist of his head / Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread." St. Nick's wink to the narrator lets him know that although the situation seems strange and even supernatural, he means no harm.
39	* SmokingIsCool: "The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth / And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath." Of course, [[{{Bowdlerise}} modern depictions of Santa don't usually smoke.]]
40	* SleepingSingle: Implied for the narrator and his wife in {{Bowdlerise}}d versions of the poem: in the original text, after describing himself and his wife preparing to go to sleep, the narrator says that at the sound of the sleigh outside, "I sprang from ''the'' bed," but most subsequent reprints change it to "I sprang from ''my'' bed."
41	* TitleConfusion: The poem was originally called ''A Visit from St. Nicholas'', but its opening line is what everyone knows it by.
42	* TropeCodifier: As stated above, this little poem etched in stone a lot of the core image we have of SantaClaus.
43	* UnbuiltTrope: While most of the poem's depiction of Santa still matches the popular imagery, the idea of him as an "elf" with a "miniature sleigh" and "tiny reindeer" fell out of favor a long time ago.
44	* WhiteTailedReindeer: The UrExample, predating the TropeCodifier ''Literature/RudolphTheRedNosedReindeer'' by over a century. The reindeer are described as "tiny" despite real life reindeer being anything but.
45	----
46
47	->''But I heard him exclaim,\
48	Ere he drove out of sight--\
49	"Happy Christmas to all,\
50	And to all a good night!"''
51	-->--The poem's closing lines
52

Context Literature / TwasTheNightBeforeChristmas