'TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS storytime with Matt Tavares

Next year will be the bicentennial of the American poem that basically invented the modern Christmas mythology. Author Clement Moore had a home here in Newport, so the celebrations will be especially festive when we welcome illustrator Matt Tavares to our store on December 9th. Matt will be reading from and presenting a new edition of his gorgeously illustrated picture book.

Exquisitely detailed drawings by Matt Tavares embody the spirit of a magical night now in a lavish, full-size gift edition marking the two-hundredth anniversary of the classic poem.



The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,

in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.



Once upon a time, children imagined St. Nicholas as a stern, skinny bishop who was as likely to dole out discipline as Christmas presents. But thanks to the poem “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas”—written by Clement C. Moore in 1822 and published the next year in the Troy Sentinel—a plumper, merrier St. Nick was born, transformed into the sleigh-riding, chimney-diving jolly old elf we now call Santa Claus. With gorgeous monochrome illustrations by Matt Tavares that are meticulously true to pre-Victorian times, this reissue of the holiday favorite ’Twas the Night Before Christmas Or Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas honors the poem’s original language in a definitive keepsake volume.

Matt Tavares is the author-illustrator of numerous acclaimed picture books, including Red and Lulu and Dasher: How a Brave Little Doe Changed Christmas Forever, as well as Becoming Babe Ruth, Growing Up Pedro, and other sports biographies. He is the illustrator of Twenty-One Steps: Guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier by Jeff Gottesfeld and The Gingerbread Pirates by Kristin Kladstrup, among many other picture books. Matt Tavares lives in Maine.