Handwritten Christmas poem sells for $280,000

A New York media executive, bidding anonymously at an auction, paid $280,000 this month for an original, handwritten copy of the Clement Clarke Moore poem we have come to know as ” ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” (formal title: “A Visit From St. Nicholas”) and read it at a holiday party to his friends.

That’s $517.56 per word for a 541-word poem that Moore wrote for his children while riding in the back of a carriage during a Christmas Eve errand in 1822.

That first manuscript was lost, but the author handwrote four copies – three now in museum collections and the fourth in the hands of the unnamed executive – said Greg Rohan, president of Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries, which managed the sale.

Moore was a New Yorker, a professor of biblical learning who was an expert in Hebrew.

Rohan flew to New York to deliver the poem, sheathed in plastic, to the party in the executive’s Fifth Avenue apartment. And there the media exec read from the yellowed paper the neat curled cursive that became perhaps the best-known Christmas verse.