What do you think of taking the smoking out of the poem Twas The Night Before Christmas ?

I would not change a classic book because there is smoking shown in it. I don’t see that anyone would associate that as telling kids that smoking is okay.

I grew up in an extremely conservative evangelical Protestant church where everything you can think of was forbidden: drinking, attending movies, dancing, playing cards, gambling, wearing makeup, and, of course, smoking.

We had a Christmas program every year that typically included the recitation of this poem. I was the one to deliver it from memory two or three years in a row.

Not one of this hypersensitive bunch was ever heard to object to the verse about the pipe and the smoke. No one suggested deleting it. Everyone understood that this was make-believe, a fantasy.

The idea of trying to eradicate from fiction all mention of things that little children shouldn’t do strikes me as absurd. I’m a long-time ex-smoker myself and deplore youngsters’ attraction to this dangerous habit, but I honestly don’t believe that censoring Santa is the way to teach abstinence. Once you start down that path, it leads to an even worse place, in my opinion.

Interesting idea, but I’m not in favor of it. Removing anything from a classic book is not cool with me. There are far better ways to educate children about the dangers of smoking than the absence of something in a poem they hear once a year.

Another vote for leaving the pipe smoking in the poem. Teens already know that smoking is dangerous to their health. A more effective method might be to have them talk to people suffering from the effects of smoking.

If you decide to take on this campaign, don’t forget about Frosty the Snowman and Popeye. And while you’re at it, can you get Santa to stop kissing Mommy under the mistletoe? That’s just not right.

Absolutely not and anyone that wishes to spend their time trying to censor original literary works needs to examine their control issues IMO.

I’m in my late 40’s and no one I knew ever smoked a pipe, although this story was read to us every year and I have bought books with this story for most of the little kids in my family. I love this poem and I always thought of Santa as being magical and from another time period, so smoking a pipe along with pot bellied stoves and high laced shoes were simply old-fashioned curiosities. I don’t think it would ever occur to a little kid to smoke a pipe because Santa does. Plus, we teach our children about the dangers of smoking, hopefully.

Any person trying to extract the smoking (and drinking, or even drug use) from popular culture and literary history from these bygone days is going to have a long road ahead. There’s episodes of tom and jerry where the characters smoked or got hammered on liquor. I remember one episode where a humorous theme threaded through the episode played off the names of various saloons, one of which was “Rocky’s : Come in and Get Stoned”. Disney movies have lots of this type of material in them as well. Didn’t Cruella Da Vil from 101 dalmatians smoke cigarettes all the time? And let’s not forget the high-off-his-ass Absalom of Wonderland and his hookah. Comics and comic books are riddled with this stuff too. And pretty much anywhere you go in the land of Middle Earth, you’ll find characters – beloved by children as well as adults – puffing away on ‘Old Toby’ and various iterations of the ‘halflings’ leaf’. There’s always even been kids versions of no-no consumables, like candy cigarettes and Big League chew. This list could literally take forever to complete, and I think Santa damn well deserves to smoke that pipe for what he does.

And if you start trying to eradicate depictions of everything that children shouldn’t do, not only will there be no action and no adventure (what fun is a risk-free story?) but you’ll have to remove all kinds of things that children shouldn’t do but adults should. What a slippery slope.

Don’t let kids see someone starting a fire or they might become a pyromaniac. How about turning on a stove? Danger! In fact, you’d better not show anyone climbing a ladder, or driving a car, or crossing a street, or cutting up vegetables with a knife, because kids might do it!!!

It makes much more sense to teach kids how to behave responsibly and safeguard their own health.

The bigger menace, in my opinion, is the notion that social ills can be corrected and risks averted by suppressing the freedom to read and write without censorship.

Promoting cigarettes ( smoking) to childen, who would become addicted before they were mature enough to make an informed choice about the risks of smoking I think we can all agree upon is wrong. In 1998 the United States Government penalized the tobacco industry with a settlement amount of 246 billion dollars and placed conditions on their activities in the area of marketing. Characters such as Joe Camel became illegal as did any cartoon characters used in advertising as they unduly influenced young impressionable and innocent children. The tobacco industry currently spends 1 million+ dollars per hour marketing. 80% of smokers get hooked before their 18th birthday. Smokers are very brand loyal. So the money the tobacco industry is spending in recruiting replacement smokers logically must be directed at young adults or as research shows youth. The Surgeon General released a 905 page report in March 2012 showing that more needs to be done in prevention and to stop the advances of the tobacco industry in luring children into the nicotine game The question remains is a character as influential as Santa and as a role model that children look up to giving the right impression if he is smoking away in the middle of the living room. Children have reported being scared that Santa will die from smoking and don’t understand why he is smoking in their house. This is the 21st century and we have spent collectively billions on research on what gets kids started. The tobacco industry would like you to believe it is about peer pressure. They advertised in the past to create the allure of smoking as being adult and sexy and desirable to fit in with the cool peers. In these modern times the message is much more covert and is simply to place tobacco in movies, in the hands and mouths of stars, and to make it appear a normal thing to do. The lead research for this is through the University of California and the work of Stanton Glantz who is actively trying to get the film industry to smarten up and clean up what tobacco messaging kids are exposed to. None of us want our kids or grand kids to start smoking. Smoking will claim the lives of half the people who become addicted and it is a sad and sorry life to want to quit something that is robbing your health and wealth and you seem helpless to stop. Addiction is a very tough concept to teach a child and all kids want to experiment with everything life has to offer. The drug nicotine, which is the most addictive drug on the planet as it takes only two cigarettes to wire the addiction component in your brain, is also a legal adult drug. It is a very very different conversation about rights and liberties when it comes to smoking and recruiting children.
Twas The Night Before Christmas is the most famous poem in the English language and spent 36 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list last year and is read all over the world. It would be a terrible shame if it was cast aside by vigilent parents who want to do whatever they can to get their kids to not start up. The World Health Organization states that one billion people will die a premature preventable death in the century from tobacco use. The only way to really stop the advance of tobacco and the enormous cost of life and toll on the healthcare system is to get one generation of children to not start smoking and it starts with checking what imagery they are being exposed to. A three year old does not even know what a classic is ? They think that Santa is a real person coming down the chimney and everything he does matters to them. Interesting last note the poet Clement C. Moore was a father of nine children and was reportedly anti smoker – the pipe was simply a sign of the times which were 1822 New York. What is a classic if it does not stand the test of time. Change does not have to be radical to be significant.