jill biden

A few days before Christmas Eve, President Joe Biden and the First Lady Jill Biden traveled to a well-endowed children's hospital in Washington, D.C. Their visit was in keeping with the long-standing White House tradition of bringing tidings of comfort and joy to patients and their families. Since the Truman administration, it's been the first lady who has made the journey. This time, however, the president accompanied the first lady. For the event, she chose to read aloud "A Visit from St. Nicholas," commonly known as "The Night Before Christmas," a poem written in 1822 by Clement Clarke Moore (1779-1863), a professor of Greek and Hebrew literature. While the first lady alternated between reading the text and showing the illustrations to her audience, her husband sat solemnly by her side.

Clement Moore married 19-year-old Catherine Elizabeth in 1813. He wrote the poem for their six children (three more were born later), and on Christmas Eve in their home in New York City, he read it aloud to their dinner guests. A man of letters known for his academic and literary accomplishments, Moore was in no hurry to acknowledge to the world that he, the author of the first Hebrew dictionary in the U.S., had composed such a light-hearted and whimsical tale. His portrait of St. Nicholas was drawn from both European and American sources, including a history of New York and its Dutch origins. The author of this chronicle recounts the dream of an actual Dutch colonist who imagined St. Nicholas descending to earth in a flying wagon, which became the sleigh in Moore's poem.