http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/twas-trial-christmas-who-really-wrote-famous-poem-f2D11758502
Bolstering his side will be the testimony of a Vassar College English professor, Don Foster, who specializes in using literary forensic techniques to unmask authors. It was Foster who made the case that Joe Klein wrote Anonymous, a thinly disguised account of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign.
For starters, Foster says, Clement Moore was a notorious sourpuss, a stern parent who warned of the dangers of temporary pleasures. Another part of the case against Moore concerns the names of the reindeer the poem's narrator hears called out by St. Nick -- "Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid" and two more.
When Moore copied the poem out by hand two decades after its publication, he wrote the last two as "Donder and Blitzen." But the version originally published by the Sentinel had them as "Dunder and Blixem," Americanized versions of the Dutch words for thunder and lightning.
"Livingston was from a Dutch family, and he would have known those words," says Duncan Crary, a Troy public relations consultant who will host the mock trial.
"Blitzen is German for lightning. Why would Moore have made that change, unless he didn't know the original Dutch? The Hudson Valley was settled by the Dutch."
Livingston's partisans also note where the stress falls in each line of the poem -- on every third syllable: "Not a CREAT-ure was STIR-ing / Not EV-en a MOUSE." Known as anapestic meter, it was used in only one poem positively attributed to Moore.
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