You've heard of the beloved "’Twas the Night Before Christmas" poem—maybe some reinterpretations and parodies of it too. But who actually wrote it, and what inspired these iconic holiday verses? As ...

It is one of the most famous poems in the English language—almost as famous as Christmas itself. A single word is enough to get going: “‘Twas”. You know the rest, or probably quite a bit of it.

The popular poem, actually titled “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” first appeared in The Times’s pages in 1896. By Tina Jordan “In thousands of homes and by hundreds of thousands of children these words ...

As far as classic Christmas Eve activities go, nothing beats reading the “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” poem with a ...