Twas the Night before Christmas: A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore
"'Twas the Night before Christmas: A Visit from St. Nicholas" by Clement Clarke Moore is a poem first published anonymously in 1823. On Christmas Eve, a father witnesses a magical visitor arrive by sleigh and reindeer, bounding down the chimney to deliver presents and fill stockings. This beloved work transformed American ideas about Santa Claus and Christmas gift-giving, though its authorship sparked controversy between Moore and Henry Livingston Jr. The poem has
been called "arguably the best-known verses ever written by an American." (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Read or download for free
For an overview of the different reading options, see our Reading Guide
| Reading Options | Url | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read now! | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17135.html.images | 38 kB | |||
| EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17135.epub3.images | 828 kB | |||
| EPUB (older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17135.epub.images | 827 kB | |||
| EPUB (no images, older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17135.epub.noimages | 128 kB | |||
| Kindle | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17135.kf8.images | 1.2 MB | |||
| older Kindles | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17135.kindle.images | 1.2 MB | |||
| Plain Text UTF-8 | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17135.txt.utf-8 | 26 kB | |||
| Download HTML (zip) | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/17135/pg17135-h.zip | 904 kB | |||
| There may be more files related to this item. | |||||
Similar Books
About this eBook
| Author | Moore, Clement Clarke, 1779-1863 |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Smith, Jessie Willcox, 1863-1935 |
| Title | Twas the Night before Christmas: A Visit from St. Nicholas |
| Note | Wikipedia page about this book: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Visit_from_St._Nicholas |
| Credits | Janet Blenkinship, Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team |
| Reading Level | Reading ease score: 78.2 (7th grade). Fairly easy to read. |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres |
| LoC Class | PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature |
| Subject | Santa Claus -- Juvenile poetry |
| Subject | Christmas -- Juvenile poetry |
| Subject | Narrative poetry |
| Subject | Children's poetry, American |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 17135 |
| Release Date | Nov 22, 2005 |
| Most Recently Updated | Jan 10, 2026 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 4368 downloads in the last 30 days. |
| Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free! | |