“Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house…” begins some of the most enchanting verse in American literature. The enchantment is real, and powerful. Clement Moore’s poem may not have started the commercialization of Christmas, but it certainly added fuel to the fire—enough, perhaps, to turn it into a raging inferno.
Yet, even for Moore’s poem to ‘catch fire’ the way it did, some kind of explanation seems warranted. In fact, to say that Moore tapped into a powerful human current is, after all, to admit to the existence of a river for the current to flow through. … continue reading...
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