Revisionist History · Pushkin Industries

Twas the Night Before Christmas

December 18, 2025·40 min·3 clips

Literary sleuth Don Foster uses computer analysis to argue Henry Livingston's fingerprints are all over the poem.

The stockings are only the doorway. What starts as a familiar Christmas recitation turns into a fight over who gets credit for a poem almost everyone knows. Ben keeps circling back to how far the poem travels. It turns up in Stuart Little, Die Hard, and presidential readings, which somehow makes the authorship dispute feel even weirder. The Livingstons need proof. More exactly, they need a stylistic case strong enough to make the poem sound like Livingston instead of Moore. Mary Van Dusen begins online, finds a poetry archive, asks for help, and gets pointed toward Don Foster, the scholar who might give the argument teeth. Then the episode moves to Washington, D.C. In the week before Thanksgiving in 2000, people gather in a bookstore to hear Foster unsettle them on C-SPAN. He looks ready for the part: blazer, khakis, tie, glasses, and an office stacked with student papers and writings by poets and playwrights, some still unknown. His reputation matters because he has already argued, using modern computer analysis, that an anonymously published poem was Shakespeare's. Here, expertise is the thing that could turn a family campaign into a public claim. The case is funny, too. There is a built-in absurdity to dragging the coziest Christmas poem into literary combat. But the stakes sharpen anyway. If Moore's claim can wobble, then a household holiday text becomes a fight over proof and belief. The host stays in the room, naming the scholars, blogs, and writers whose work carries the episode. The ending refuses to wrap things neatly. Listeners who doubt Moore are sent to the Livingstonians' latest salvo, then told to read the response on Melvilliana. The holiday greeting lands after the poem has become much less settled.

As heard by us

A Christmas staple becomes a literary authorship puzzle, driven by family persistence and a memorable professor.

Revisionist History turns "Twas the Night Before Christmas" into a literary mystery, with the holiday trim still clinging to the evidence. The episode traces the Livingston family's long push to prove the poem sounded like their ancestor, then gives the case a vivid center…

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Why you'd press play

Press play when Twas the Night Before Christmas stops sitting prettily on the mantel and turns into an authorship mystery with holiday glitter on its shoes.

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