Cappeau, a wine merchant and poet, had been asked by a parish priest to write a Christmas poem.

This famous Christmas poem first appeared in the Troy Sentinel on December 23, 1823.

And turn over the page and there is a Christmas poem for capitalists...

He gives us a cozy-looking family scene, Dad about to read a Christmas poem to the wife and children.

Mr. Ciccone also produced what he said was a homophobic Christmas poem that someone had passed around to sheriff's deputies over the holidays.

His poem The Vicar of Southbury's story: a Christmas poem was published posthumously in 1867.

Sullivan contributed forty-two Christmas poems, as they were known, from 1932 to 1974.

He has written numerous fiction, non-fiction, and criticism, and formerly wrote an annual Christmas poem for The New Yorker.

When the Christmas poems resume, in 1985, they have shed most of the early jeweled assertiveness.

In other Christmas poems he admonished his own children to be humble, mindful of their mortality and aloof from transient pleasures.