"A Visit from St. Nicholas" is a poem written in 1822 by Clement Clarke Moore and is more commonly known as "The Night Before Christmas" or "'Twas the Night Before Christmas". There is a slight controversy nowadays concerning the authorship of the poem, with some researchers believing that the original author was Henry Livingston Jr.
Thomas Nast was an 18th-century American caricaturist whose multi-framed illustration of "Santa Claus and His Works" depicting Sankt Nikolaus in Harper's Weekly magazine on December 25th, 1866, offered the world the modern version of Santa Claus.