'Twas the Night Before Christmas

Clement Clarke Moore's Wondrous Poem

Noel sings “The Night Before Christmas” in the 1988 Peter, Paul, & Mary PBS Holiday Concert at Carnegie Hall

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One of the most memorable scenes from the PBS Peter, Paul and Mary’s The Holiday Concert at Carnegie Hall is that of Noel sitting in front of a gathering of children as he sings “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.” If you’ve watched it, you can’t help but be aware of the poem’s ability to be both a song and an intimate story of a wondrous evening in the life of many families.

Here Noel recounts the writing of his musical version of the poem.

It's the autumn of 1986, in the Newport, Rhode Island, living room of my friend Matthew Quinn. We are shoulder to shoulder, he bent over an electronic keyboard translating (and sometimes replacing) chords that I've assembled on my guitar.

The lengthy poem has always been a challenge to anyone trying to place it within a melodic structure. Attempts by other composers to compress the information into fewer lines invariably disrupt the flow because the loss of any one section weakens the story line. Matthew and I have just timed our first rough sketch of the tune. It's nearly five minutes long—too long for most airplay—perhaps too long for anything but the most formal of classical presentations.”

"I'd hate to cut this...." I murmur reluctantly.

"Uh-huh...’ says Matthew pensively, leaning back in his chair. "He lived just up the block, you know."

"Huh?"

"Clement Moore ... just up the street."

"Really? Here in Newport?" I ask.

Matthew nods. A few seconds pass, and I hum a few bars from the Twilight Zone theme. Matthew grins, picks up his pencil, and we both look down again at the sheet music. Though nothing specific is said, we both know that there will be no edits to this text.

In 2010 Peter and Noel published a new edition of The Night Before Christmas, beautifully illustrated by Eric Puybaret. The book contained a CD of Mary reading the poem with Noel playing guitar in the background. After Mary’s death in September 2009, Noel and Peter performed a dozen or so concerts a year for several years as a way to say goodbye to Mary with an audience. The new edition was another part of their farewell.

In a 2010 interview Noel recalled, “Peter and a recording engineer visited Mary in her home in Connecticut to record the piece. Mary was in fragile health at that point. She was on oxygen.” He continued, “So rather than reading the poem in a proclamation voice, or an oratorical voice she read it almost as if she were confiding it to a child, as if she were telling the poem in a conspiratorial whisper before bedtime. Mary’s reading, accompanied by Noel’s noodling on the guitar, was the last recording she made.

Wishing you sweet memories, peace and joy in this holiday season,

Noel and Jeanne

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Connections:

See the cover of the Peter, Paul and Mary book and listen to the holiday concert version of “Twas the Night before Christmas” here:

Vibrations:

See an animated version of the song:

Reflections:

The Night Before Christmas” is arguably the most famous American poem ever written. Mary of us have been able to recite it by heart since we were children. Its rhyme scheme and rhythm make it easy to memorize. Some essays on the poem have pointed out that it has, for better or worse, strongly shaped the way we celebrate Christmas in the United States. On the positive side, Clement Clark Moore, a professor of Greek and Hebrew at an Episcopal seminary in New York, originally wrote it for his own children, simply to entertain them on Christmas Eve, and it has brought wonder and joy to generations of children since. However, critics point out that the poem helped to create the version of Santa Claus that has fostered the commercialization of Christmas. How do you regard the influence it has had on the way we celebrate Christmas?

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