SYMHC Classics: Christmas Triple-Feature

This 2018 episode takes a look at three creative works that have become staples of the Christmas season. All three of them have played a huge part in how people observe and celebrate Christmas in parts of the world, and they all had milestone birthdays that year.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday and Merry Christmas to those who are celebrating.
Since today's episode is coming out on Christmas Day, we
thought we would replay a particularly Christmas Ee episode as
our Saturday Classic, and it is our Christmas triple feature,
which originally came out on December and covers three Christmas

(00:22):
classics that were each having milestone birthdays that year. So
enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class a
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Honley Frying. Today's podcast

(00:46):
is coming out on Christmas Eve, so it seems like
a good time to take a look at three creative
works that have become staples of the Christmas season. All
three of them have played a huge part in how
people observe and celebrate Christmas and parts of the world,
and they all happen to have milestone birthdays this year.

(01:07):
So A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens turned a hundred
and seventy five on December nineteen. The poem A Visit
from St. Nicholas turned a hundred on December Probably we're
going to talk a little bit about that too, and
then the song Still Knocked or Silent Night is turning
two hundred on the day that this episode comes out.

(01:29):
I will tell you that if you had asked me
before any of this research landing in my hand, I
would have reversed the order that I believed they were
in terms of age. You would have put the You
would have put Silent Night as the youngest one. Yeah, yeah,
I don't know why, but in my brain it seems newer.
I don't know why. Um I think I bet it

(01:50):
has to do with perception that I always see a
Christmas Carol or I have often seen a Christmas Carol
played out in old timey costumes, and that has been
the case with the other two. So in my head,
those must be those must be the younger ones. I
think that's what it is. But we are going to
start with the youngest of these three works, and that
is Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol in Prose being a

(02:11):
Ghost Story of Christmas, first published by Chapman and Hall
on December nineteenth, eighteen forty three. And this novella begins
with the author's note quote, I have endeavored in this
ghostly little book to raise the ghost of an idea
which shall not put my readers out of humor with themselves,
with each other, with the season, or with me. May

(02:32):
it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wished to
lay it their faithful friend and servant C. D. Today's
readers may miss the double meaning of to lay it,
which meant both to lay the book down and to
lay the ghost Dickens was raising to rest. Then the
book moves on to the relatively un Christmas e opening

(02:53):
line of Marley was dead to begin with. There is
no doubt whatsoever about that. Then it introduced is Ebenezer
Scrooge quote a typefisted hand at the grindstone, a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching,
covetous old center. There's also his jolly and kind hearted
nephew Fred, his ill treated employee Bob Cratchett, cratch its son,

(03:17):
Tiny Tim, and the ghosts of Marley and the spirits
of Christmas past, present and yet to come. The story,
of course, follows Scrooge as he becomes a kinder and
more generous person through the intervention of all these spirits.
God bless us everyone. A Christmas Carol is commonly named
as one of the best selling books of all time,

(03:37):
but because of its age, that's actually pretty tricky to confirm,
and at this point there are also hundreds and hundreds
of adaptations across many genres and many types of media.
You can see flickers of it in everything from It's
a Wonderful Life to How the grinchtul Christmas, and none
of this colossal popularity is new. When it was first

(03:58):
published in eighteen forty three, its first run of six
thousand copies sold out in just a week, and within
two months of its debut, eight different dramatic versions were
already being staged. But Charles Dickens didn't originally set out
to write a book when he wrote a Christmas Carol,
his original intent was a pamphlet. Earlier, in eighteen forty three,

(04:20):
he had read a report on child labor in Britain,
and he had also visited what he described as a
ragged school. Urbanization, industrialization and the eighteen thirty four Poor
Laws had all combined to create a system of really
devastating poverty. In nineteenth century England. Conditions at a lot
of the factories were just appalling, and children employed in

(04:43):
the factories frequently did exhausting and dangerous work. This whole
system was also set up so that the poor were
forced to go work in workhouses, but the conditions at
those workhouses were so terrible into humanizing, that people would
do anything rather than to go there. Dickens thoughts on
all of this were certainly influenced by his own lived experience.

(05:07):
When he was a child, his father was placed in
a debtor's prison over an unpaid bakery bill. Dickens had
to leave school and work in a boot blacking factory.
So Dickens wanted to do something about all of this,
and he initially planned a pamphlet called an Appeal to
the People of England on Behalf of the poor Man's Child,
but he quickly decided that a work of fiction might

(05:29):
do a better job of getting his point across than
a pamphlet. Wood He also had a practical motivation to
write a book instead of a pamphlet. He flat out
needed money. He had just come back from a tour
of the US, where he had been treated like a celebrity,
but he hadn't earned very much, so he needed to
write a work that would sell, and that meant a
book not a pamphlet. He cranked out a Christmas Carol

(05:53):
over just a couple of months of writing while also
working on the Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit as
a serial. He's described as basically the most famous writer
living at that moment, and so he went on this
whole tour of the US and Canada and was just
hailed everywhere that he went, but did not earn money

(06:13):
off of it. Christmas Carol really synthesizes a lot that
was going on at the time that it was written.
There's the Victorian fascination with ghosts and the supernatural, the
horrors of poverty and morality. The character of Ebenezer Scrooge
really embodies commonly held attitudes towards the poor, seeing them

(06:33):
as a burden on society who just deserved the cruelties
and degradations of the workhouse. The celebration of Christmas in
Britain was also shifting during this time. Christmas trees, turkey dinners,
decorating with evergreens, gifts, and greeting cards were all becoming
more and more popular. So A Christmas Carol both reflected

(06:53):
and reinforced the Victorian idea of how to celebrate Christmas.
It's also credited with pop arizing Merry Christmas as a
Christmas greeting and with the idea that there should be
snow at Christmas. Even though A Christmas Carol was an
instant bestseller, Dickens did not make nearly as much money
with it as he hoped, and this was mostly because

(07:15):
of his own decisions. He wanted this book to be
really nice, with fancy gilded bindings and woodcuts and edgings
and extravagant lettering. All that stuff cost money. He even
made last minute changes to the title and in pages
of the books because he wasn't satisfied with the original versions.
All of this was very expensive and cut very deeply

(07:37):
into his profits. That entire first printing only netted two
hundred thirty pounds, and that was a fraction of the
thousand pounds that he had hoped to make off of
this book. In its first year, A Christmas Carol sold
fifteen thousand copies, and even after that he still was
not anywhere close to that thousand pound mark. It's like

(07:58):
he needed a business manager or to explain like how
the ballance of of profit works um And while the
book was not a financial success at all, It was
incredibly well received. It was nicknamed a new gospel. William
make Peace. Thackeray described it as quote a national benefit
and to every man and woman who reads it, a

(08:19):
personal kindness. It also appears to have inspired exactly the
kind of charitable mindset that Dickens had hoped that it
would when he decided to write it. The following spring,
Gentleman's magazine reported quote, more extensive kindness has been dispensed
to those who are in want at the present season
than at any preceding one. Later on, Robert Louis Stevenson

(08:42):
wrote to a friend that after reading this book, he
wanted to quote go out and comfort someone, and he
insisted in the same letter that the idea of not
handing out money to people who needed it was just nonsense.
On top of all that, A Christmas Carol launched the
genre of Christmas books. It also popular is the genre
of Christmas ghost stories, although the British tradition of telling

(09:03):
ghost stories around a fire in winter definitely predates Dickens's work.
Dickenspace's disparity between how his book was received and how
much money he made off of it with a lot
of frustration. He summed up his chagrin in a letter saying, quote,
what a wonderful thing it is that such a great
success should occasion me such intolerable anxiety and disappointment. It

(09:25):
took him more than ten years after this book came
out to really get on stable financial footing. At the
same time, though, he was genuinely glad that it inspired
such a wave of seasonal goodwill and really spread the
idea that employers had a duty not to be completely
horrible to their employees. I don't know why that tickles me,
but it does. Uh. Today Dickens's original handwritten manuscript of

(09:48):
a Christmas Carol is at the Morgan Library and Museum
in New York City, and they put it on display
there every Christmas season. I don't think I have been
at the Morrigan at exactly the time when they're showing it.
But when I realized that, I was like, do I
need to go to New York between now at the
end of the year. I don't think I do. We

(10:08):
will get into our next little piece of culture after
a quick sponsor break. People may know our next subject,
which is the poem A Visit from St. Nicholas by
another name, The Night before Christmas A Visit from St.

(10:31):
Nicholas is sometimes also called an Account of a Visit
from St. Nicholas, and it was first published in the
Troy Sentinel of Troy, New York on December twenty three.
This is the one that starts twas the night before Christmas,
when all through the house not a creature was stirring,
not even a mouse. The narrator and his wife and
the story are settling in forbid when St. Nicholas arrives

(10:53):
in a miniature sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer. In
the first printing they were named Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, comment, Cupid, Dunder,
and Blixum not litzen. Uh. St Nicholas not Honor is
described as chubby and plump, All right, jolly old elf.
He comes down the chimney with a bound. He fills

(11:15):
all the stockings with presents, and then he goes back
up the chimney before flying away, exclaiming Happy Christmas to all,
and to all a good night. Similarly to how a
Christmas carol really reinforced and spread the way that the
Victorians were celebrating Christmas, this poem had a huge effect
on how people think about Christmas, especially St. Nick. Among
other things, A Visit from St. Nicholas really cemented jolly

(11:38):
old St. Nick as this rotund and laughing person with
twinkling eyes and a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer who
comes into people's homes by sliding down the chimney. That's
not the first ever appearance of sliding down the chimney,
but it did really popularize all of that. And then
they're also the sugar plums, which went on to become
a prominent part of the nutcracker sweet in eight after

(12:02):
that first appearance of the poem, in eighteen twenty three,
the Troy Sentinel reprinted a Visit from St. Nicholas every year,
still anonymously. Over the years, it went through various edits,
mostly related to changes in spelling. For example, in earlier
editions of the poem, the narrator sprung from the bed,
but later he sprang, and of course dunder and blixum

(12:24):
became dunder Mifflin, No I'm kidding became donner and blitzen Uh.
The poem was picked up in other publications as well.
As This poem grew in popularity, people started writing into
the Troy Sentinel to talk about or to ask about,
who the author was. In eighteen nine, the paper printed
that they could only say that it was someone quote

(12:44):
by birth and residence to the city of New York,
and that he is a gentleman of more merit as
a scholar and a writer than many of more noisy pretensions. Then,
in eighteen thirty seven, Charles Fenno Hoffman published a book
called New York Book of Poetry, in which he named
the author of a Visit from St. Nicholas as his friend,

(13:05):
Clement Clark Moore. Moore was a scholar and a professor
at the General Theological Seminary in New York City, where
he taught subjects such as Hebrew and Greek literature. His
other works included a two volume compendious lexicon of the
Hebrew language. At first, More didn't really acknowledge Hoffmann's claim
that he had written a Visit from St. Nicholas, but

(13:27):
in eighteen forty four he included the work in an
anthology of his poetry. He said that he had written
it for his children back in eighteen twenty two and
that he had never intended for it to be made
public outside their family at all. The most common explanation
for how it came to be in the pages of
the Troy Sentinel was that a family friend named Sarah

(13:48):
Harriet Butler had visited that Christmas of eighteen twenty two
and taken a copy of this family poem home with her,
and then sent it to the Sentinel the following year
without telling more about it. In eighteen sixty two, the
librarian of the New York Historical Society asked More to
handwrite a copy of it for their collections, and he did.

(14:09):
You can see a scan of it online at the
New York Historical Society Museum and Library website. At the time,
the Society's librarian noted that when they were discussing this
request for a manuscript, Moore said his inspiration for his
depiction of St. Nick was quote a portly rubicund Dutchman
living in the neighborhood. He wrote out other copies of

(14:30):
the poem on request as well. However, there's also a
competing claim to the authorship of a visit from St. Nicholas.
Descendants of Major Henry Livingston Jr. Had said that he,
not More, was the one who wrote the poem all
the way back in roughly eighteen o eight, a few
years after the eighteen forty four anthology of Moore's poetry

(14:50):
came out. The Livingston's learned about it, and various members
of the family started writing to each other about how
Moore was taking credit for their father or grandfather's poem,
depending on who was doing the writing, but they didn't
really go public with their allegations until the early nineteen hundreds.
By that point, all they really had to go on
with this claim was their family lore. The family members

(15:12):
who had said they had personal memories of it had
all died, and then Livingstone himself had been dead for
sixteen years when Moore's anthology came out, so even when
that anthology came out, they could not just go ask him, hey,
is this the poem that you wrote? There is no
original handwritten copy of a visit from St. Nicholas from
eighteen o eight or eighteen twenty two. The Livingstone family

(15:36):
said they had a manuscript with handwritten notes, but that
it was destroyed in a fire around eighteen fifty nine.
So this has spawned a debate over who should actually
get credit. Moore's supporters have pointed out that the Troy
Sentinel described the poet as a scholar from New York City.
More was a scholar and was born in New York City,

(15:56):
and when this poem was first published, he was living
in a eight in Chelsea, Manhattan. Livingstone, on the other hand,
was neither a scholar nor from New York City. He
was sort of a gentleman farmer living in Poughkeepsie, roughly
eighty miles or a hundred and twenty nine kilometers north
of New York City. More supporters also questioned why More

(16:17):
would take credit for the poem if he didn't write it,
going so far as to write out copies for historical collections,
especially since he seemed kind of embarrassed that it had
even been published in the first place. More as a detractors,
on the other hand, have contended that he was too
preachy and cranky to have written such a lighthearted poem,
and also that he hated children. They've also noted that

(16:39):
Moore's family members gave three completely different stories about what
inspired him to write it. One was that it was
written to cheer up the sun after he was thrown
from a horse and broke his leg. Another was that
he wrote it after having to go out on Christmas
Eve to find a turkey after the butcher didn't deliver their's,
And the last was that it was written after hearing
the bells jingling on his horse while traveling to his

(17:01):
Chelsea estate by slay. So they point to the existence
of these three disparate stories as a sign that none
of them are true. Some of those spelling changes made
to the poem over the years have also been brought
up as evidence that Moore did not write it, especially
dunder and blixum to donner and Blitzen. Dunder and Blixum

(17:22):
is supposedly derived from the Dutch words for thunder and lightning,
and Livingstone spoke Dutch. However, Moore spoke German, and donner
und blitz is German for thunder and lightning. Ye, dunder
and donna are really the words for thunder. Neither blix
um nor blitzen is exactly the word for lightning. It's

(17:44):
close in those two languages. Moore's detractors have also brought
up a handwritten note on the title page of a
book that he donated to the New York Historical Society.
The note says, by clements seem Moore a m this
book is a translation of another work in Moore's detractors
say that this is evidence that he made a habit

(18:06):
of just taking credit for other people's work, but his
supporters counter that this note is not even in his handwriting,
and that it's probably not him trying to say I
translated this book, but it's just the notation written by
someone else at the Historical Society to Mark who donated
the book today. Livingston supporters include Donald Foster of Vassar College,

(18:28):
who wrote Author Unknown on the Trail of Anonymous, and
McDonald P. Jackson of the University of Auckland, author of
who wrote The Night Before Christmas. Analyzing the Clement Clark
Moore versus Henry Livingston question. Both Foster and Jackson ground
their arguments in linguistic forensics, with Jackson's book having such
chapter titles as the Evidence of Meter, Statistical Interlude, Phony Pairs,

(18:54):
Definite and indefinite articles, and Favorite Expressions, and Quirks of Style.
But of these men argue that the poem uses language
in a way that makes it more likely to be
Livingstone's than More's and Jackson's analysis, the most important part
is quote, the frequencies of common words such as the
on as at to that would, and some vocutions such

(19:19):
as mania and in vain, and phony pairs comprised of
the last phonetic symbol on in one word and the
first in the next. Jackson goes on to state that
these elements of language are not easy to imitate and
are outside the conscious control of a writer. After Foster's
book Author Unknown was published, historic document dealer Seth Keller

(19:40):
published a point by point rebuttal of the various claims
against Clement Moore as author of a Visit from St. Nicholas,
including Foster's forensic analysis. When it comes to the more
subjective claims of things like More's temperament, Keller's response is
sort of no, he wasn't a jerky pedant who hated
kids here are example. But when it came to the

(20:01):
linguistic analysis, Caller contended that Foster cherry picked the evidence
that supported the idea that Livingstone was the author, while
discarding everything that did not support his idea. Caller concludes
unequivocally that Moore wrote the poem. McDonald p. Jackson's book
Just came out in April of twenties sixteen, so it
is really new, and there really has not been a

(20:23):
lot of scrutiny into whether his analysis holds up. I
found one blog post on that subject and nothing in
any peer reviewed journal or anything like that. The book
author unknown as much older, so there's been a lot
more writing about whether those conclusions are valid. However, it's
important to note that there is debate about whether linguistic

(20:44):
forensics can reliably and conclusively identify the author of a
work at all, especially as the field stands right now.
The field itself is kind of divided over this issue
of can linguistic forensics conclusively identify the author of an
unknown work, and several of Foster's other attempts to use

(21:05):
forensic linguistics and criminal investigations have been completely wrong. This
includes falsely implicating the wrong man in the September eleven
anthrax attacks in the United States, which led to a
massive defamation suit. Keller, Jackson, and Foster are just the
latest round of people to weigh in on this topic.

(21:25):
It's been the subject of ongoing debate since about n
and at this point you will find the poem attributed
in a lot of different ways Encyclopedia Britannica's entry on
the poem attributes it to neither man, but acknowledges the
issue of its authorship in a paragraph. The Academy of
American Poets lists More as the author, as do various

(21:46):
publications from the U S Library of Congress. The Poetry
Foundation confusingly has the poem on two different pages on
its website, one attributed to More and the other attributed
to Livingston. Livingston's biography at the Poetry Foundation lists him
unequivocally as the author, while Moore's points out the lack

(22:06):
of concrete evidence in Livingstone's claim before saying, scholars today
give the credit to Livingstone. I don't know what scholars
are talking about. I am not a linguist. I am
not a forensic scientist. But as a poet, I find
the idea that you can conclusively determine what the author

(22:28):
was of a five hundred and something word poem with
some computer analysis. I find that specious. I was having
a conversation with somebody about this yesterday, and I think
that forensic linguistics has the potential to someday be sort
of like fingerprinting in terms of identifying people. But at

(22:50):
this point it's a lot more like phrenology. So that's
my Uh. I read a lot of very frustrating charts
of words in their use in different works by Clemet
Moore and and Livingston, and I found it all very frustrating.
And as a side note, this is not the only
he said she said back and forth about the authorship

(23:11):
of a Christmas classic. Medford, Massachusetts and Savannah, Georgia, two
cities I cannot think of more different from one another,
have both claimed to be the place where James Pierrepont
wrote jingle Bells. They even have their own plaque about it,
each city having a plaque saying this is where where

(23:31):
he wrote jingle Bells. Over the last couple of years,
there's been a whole other argument raised about that author
or that location of where it was written, which is
that it might not be either of them. They might
both be wrong. Uh. Both cities, however, feel extremely passionately
about it. And we are going to move on to
something that that has a much clearer authorship after another

(23:54):
quick break. The song Studa Knocked, known in English as
Silent Night or a Silent Night Holy Night, was created
in the eighteen teens, and since neither Holly nor I
speak German, we do not want to traumatize people with

(24:17):
h like preschool Irish attempt to read lyrics in German instead.
Here is the beginning of the song from a nineteen
fourteen recording sung by Julia Colp. The most common English

(25:38):
translation of this song is by episcopal priest John Freeman Young,
who was born in Pittston, Maine, and later became Bishop
of Florida. His eighteen fifty nine version starts silent night,
Holy night, All is calm, all is bright round yon,
Virgin mother and child, Holy infant, So tender and mild,

(25:59):
Sleep in heavenly peace, Sleep in heavenly peace. The original
German lyrics to Still An Act were written by Joseph Moore.
More had been born into poverty in Salzburg on December eleventh,
seventeen ninety two, and when he was still a child,
a local priest started mentoring him and saw that he
had a talent for music. This priest helped him get

(26:21):
an education, including studying music at a Benedictine monastery. More
also attended the Lyceum school in Salzburg. In eighteen eleven,
More entered seminary, something that he had to get a
special dispensation to do because his parents had not been married.
He was ordained in eighteen fifteen, and in eighteen sixteen

(26:41):
he moved to the town of maryap Far in Lungao
in the Austrian Alps for his first assignment as an
assistant priest, and this area was also where his father's
family was from, and it was where he wrote the
poem that would become the lyrics to Silent Night in
eighteen sixteen. He never described a s ific inspiration for

(27:01):
the poem, but Maria Far, which translates to Mary's Parish,
had been the spiritual and religious heart of the Longal
region for centuries, and it had also really really struggled
in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. It had been
occupied by Bavarian troops, and those troops were finally withdrawing
at about the same time that more started working there.

(27:23):
So it makes a lot of sense that all of
this would come together to inspire a poem about the
birth of Christ that prominently featured the themes of peace,
love and salvation. Working as an assistant priest required more
to move from place to place than by eighteen eighteen.
He had arrived in Obendorff by Salzburg, roughly eighty miles

(27:43):
that's about a hundred and thirty kilometers northwest of Maria
Far on the Austrian border, and like Maria Far, this
region had been through its share of turmoil. Starting in
the thirteenth century. It had been part of a state
that was ruled by the prince archbishops of the City
of Salzburg. In eighteen oh three, it had been forced
to secularize. Then, after the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of

(28:06):
Vienna drew a new border through the region, and what
had been its own entity was divided up and absorbed
into Austria and Bavaria. Part of this new border followed
the Salzac River, which ran directly through town, and so
what had been one municipality became Obendorf by Salzburg, Austria
on the east side of the river, and Laffen, Bavaria

(28:28):
on the west. The war had also affected the salt trade,
which was a major part of the local economy, so
laborers and boat builders, who made up most of the
population of Obendorf were really struggling. After the new border
was drawn, a parish was established at Obendorf by Salzburg
at the Church of St. Nicholas, and that is where

(28:48):
Moore became assistant priest in eighteen eighteen. And as a
side note, More did not get along with the parish
priest there, who accused him of, among other things, singing
songs which do not edify. The organist at the Church
of St. Nicholas was a man named Franz Xaver Gruber.
Gruber was born on November seven and his parents were

(29:12):
linen weavers, but his real interest was in music, and
his teacher encouraged this interest and gave him some music
lessons outside of his regular studies. At first, Gruber went
into the family linen business, but when he turned eighteen,
his father gave him permission to find work as a teacher.
Gruber hoped that teaching would let him keep pursuing music.

(29:33):
It was pretty common for teachers to also work as
church organists. He found an internship with another organist, and
he got his first job as a teacher in eighteen
oh seven. In eighteen eighteen, he was working as the
organist at the Church of St. Nicholas, along with working
as a school teacher. A church caretaker and as organist
at another church. On Christmas Eve eighteen eighteen, More went

(29:57):
to Gruber and asked him to write a melody to
along with that poem he had written two years earlier.
More wanted something suitable for a choir with two soloists
accompanied by a guitar, and it's not totally clear what
prompted this request. One hypothesis is that the church organ
was broken. Today, there are a lot of really dramatic

(30:18):
explanations for what was wrong with the organ, including a
mouse infestation that's really not uh substantiated in anyway, and
the fact that the organ was broken is really speculative.
Whatever the reason, Gruber wrote the music and presented it
to More on that same day, and Gruber described it

(30:39):
as just a simple composition, but More was pleased enough
with it that he decided to include it as part
of that night's Christmas Eve mass. More saying the tenor
part and played the guitar, and Gruber sang the bass part.
Very little is known about this first performance on Christmas
Eve eighteen eighteen, but Gruber later described it as receiving

(30:59):
quote general approval by all so still, Nach started out
as a simple song for Christmas Eve, with lyrics by
an assistant priest and a melody by a church organist.
This is what I really love about the story. These
were just regular people doing their regular work at their
local church, performing for a congregation of laborers and their families,

(31:21):
all living at a place that had just come through
a war and was struggling economically. And in the years
that followed, the song continued to be performed all around
this part of Austria. There are surviving copies of the
music and lyrics that belonged to various teachers, choir directors, vicars,
and the like. By the eighteen thirties, the song had
started to spread beyond Austria, mostly through traveling groups of

(31:43):
family singers. One was the Strasser family singers, who performed
the song in Leipzig in eighteen thirty two. A newspaper
article promoting the upcoming concert even said that the writer
hoped that they would sing stealen Nacht, meaning that by
that point the song had been performed there before four.
It is not known exactly how and when the song
spread beyond Europe, but the Rainer family singer started a

(32:06):
North American tour in eighteen thirty nine, and they performed
the song on Christmas Day of that year. But in
the process of copying and passing along this music, people
had left off the attribution some More and Gruber. By
the eighteen fifties, folks were trying to figure out who
had written this song that at this point had become
incredibly popular. Word got back to Gruber about the search,

(32:29):
and on December eighteen fifty four he wrote his authentic
account of the origin of the Christmas carol Silent Night,
Holy Night. Of course it was really titled in German.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Silent Night had
been performed in one language or another on almost every continent. Today,
it has been translated into more than three hundred languages

(32:49):
and dialects. It's also remembered as one of the songs
sung during the Christmas Eve Truce in World War One.
In eleven, UNESCO designated it as an Intangible Cultural Heritage
being Crosby's nineteen thirty five version is reportedly the number
three best selling single of all time. You see that
statistic a lot. How they came up with it is

(33:12):
a little unclear, And of course More and Gruber both
lived their own lives. After that first performance of Silent
Night and their song becoming so popular, More moved from
parish to parish on various assignments, becoming known as a
social reformer in his later work as a parish priest,
and he died on December four, eight Gruber continued to

(33:33):
teach and work as an organist and a choir director.
He was married three times, remarrying after the deaths of
his first and second wives. He also had at least
twelve children, but only four lived to adulthood. One of them,
his son, Felix, followed in his footsteps as a composer
and a musician. Gruber died on June seven, eighteen sixty three.

(33:54):
The St. Nicholas Church is no longer standing, but today
there is a chapel on the former site known as
the Opendorf Silent Night Chapel. The guitar that More played
also still survives and is in a museum. I find
that whole story kind of lovely, just a simple story
about a simple song that has stayed around for two
hundred years. It is very sweet. I also, before we

(34:18):
get into some listener mail, I want to thank Christopher
Hasciotis who did some research for this day in History
class about the first publication of a Christmas carol, which
became a part of the research for that part of
today's episode. So thanks Christopher Heay so much for joining

(34:41):
us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of
the archive, if you heard an email address or a
Facebook U r L or something similar over the course
of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current
email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com.
Our old health Stuff Works email address no longer work us,
and you can find us all over social media at

(35:02):
missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show
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(35:24):
favorite shows.