News at Eleven: "He really existed and he was really elfin,"

says [Dinghy] Sharp.

Jan-Peter, she adds, would sit at a potbelly stove in the general store, telling stories to the children.

After he returned home, great-great grandfather [Clement] Moore, says Sharp, finished the poem that had probably been percolating in his head for some time--a poem to lift the spirits of his six children, especially 6-year-old daughter Charity, who was ill with tuberculosis.

That Christmas, Moore recited his poem to his family. "Everyone loved it," says Sharp, including cousin Harriet Butler. "She wrote it down in what they called a woman's notebook," says Sharp.

from The Arizona Daily Star: Her kin's beloved poem

~~~~~~~~~~~