the night before christmas by clement c moore book

Pluck a discoloured 10p piece from the garden and he'll wonder if a Roman dropped it there. Sit a small boy in front of a Laurel and Hardy film and he'll assume he's at the premiere. The past, present and future all huddle together in intimate proximity. I think that, for children, time has a tendency to concertina. It was in a book – which therefore made it sacred, true, and brimming with mystery. And yet at no stage did this make me doubt what I was being shown, or worry that Grandma might have played a bit fast and loose with her commission. He was, variously, a cuddly Teddy Roosevelt, a beady-eyed Rasputin and some exultant pagan god, with his tan tunic and blood daubed on each cheek. Sometimes she depicted the narrator's house as a grand New England colonial sometimes a log cabin in the middle of nowhere. Her pictures arrived in a jumble and felt oddly out of sequence. She was great with colour, bad with perspective.

Grandma Moses's paintings were bright and rich and primitive. I must have spent hours pondering the significance of this cat (for wasn't a cat a creature too?), in the same way I wondered what sugar plums were, and why they might dance in someone's head. 'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house/Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.' Not even a mouse? The accompanying illustration showed a grey tomcat, prowling a living room with its tail in the air. Except that my own edition (which, so far as I knew, was the only edition) came with illustrations 'especially painted for this book by Grandma Moses' and Grandma Moses, it transpired, had a lofty disregard for the text. Moore's heroic couplets ( which we now know may not even have been written by Moore at all) give an eyewitness account of Santa's visit on a snowbound Christmas Eve. Apologies to the wise men, and the baby in the manger.

And out of these three, I think the last was the most purely enticing, the most freighted with meaning. As a child, my most resonant Christmas stories were the 1970 film Scrooge (in which Albert Finney starts out as a sour old curmudgeon and then mutates into a leaping, giggling maniac), the tale of the three wise men who gathered at the manger, and The Night Before Christmas, a 19th-century verse by Clement C Moore.

The night before christmas by clement c moore book