Twas the Night Before Christmas Literary Elements

Narrative poetry

Christmas Eve somewhere far north enough to experience snow in December.

First person narration by unnamed man with a wife and small children.

The tone is light-hearted in the face of circumstances which might actually provoke some anxiety and the mood is one of anticipatory excitement.

Protagonist: the narrator and St. Nick. Antagonist: N/A.

The only real conflict in the story occurs at the very beginning when a loud noise wakes the narrator from his sleep and this is resolved by the fifth stanza with the realization that the mysterious clatter was caused by Santa and reindeer-drawn sleigh.

The climax occurs with St. Nick wishing a happy Christmas to the narrator as he flies off into the darkness aboard his sleigh.

The opening stanza situates the house as being in the grip of an especially quite night in which everybody is in bed thinking of St. Nick’s arrival sometime during the night. The opening revelation that it takes places on Christmas Eve is the final element in this stanza serving as foreshadowing for the loud clatter which marks the arrival of St. Nick delivering Christmas goodies.

The entire description of what must absolutely be an exceedingly complicated maneuver—a man coming down a chimney carrying a bundle of toys—is presented in pure, unadorned understatement: “Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.”

The poem’s final line has Santa wishing season’s greetings as his sleigh zooms off to the next house. Although often changed in later editions, notably the original has Santa wishing not the more traditional “Merry Christmas” but rather “Happy Christmas.” Legend has it that although “Merry Christmas” had been in use since at least the 1500’s, the alternative “Happy Christmas” came into vogue during the late Victoria Era because “merry” had too strong a connotation with drunken behavior. If true, then the use of “Happy Christmas” is an allusion to this primarily British moral imposition on Christmas greetings which never quite actually quite caught on in America.

The names of the last two reindeer mentioned by Santa—Donder and Blitzen—serve to implicate the supernatural power of the reindeer charged with leading powering St. Nick’s sleigh. These two words roughly translate together “thunder and lightning” and thus lend the poem something akin to imagery that might be found in a work of Norse mythology.

The nighttime setting is made easy for the narrator to see from his vantage point inside the house by the moonlight reflecting off the snow on the ground creating a paradoxical lighting situation similar to what it would be around noon:
“The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below”

A parallel construction based on a unifying choice of conjunction describes the actual working ritual of St. Nick once inside the house:
"He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose”

The narrator depicts the process of he and his wife going to sleep in this manner when he describes them both as having “just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap”

N/A