A handwritten list and a pen left on a desk under a lamp on a winter evening

Published September 24, 2026 · The Naughty or Nice Team · fact-checked against the sources below

Santa’s list is younger than it feels. The idea that he writes down who has been good, goes back over the names a second time, and knows what children do when nobody is looking comes from a popular song published in 1934. The poem that gave us the reindeer, a hundred and eleven years earlier, says nothing about behavior.

That is the short answer, and it is the sort of thing that is worth knowing at about half past seven on a December evening, when a five year old asks the question with genuine concern and you realize you have never thought about it once in your life.

Where does the list actually come from?

A songwriter on a subway train, in a bad week.

The song is “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”: music by J. Fred Coots, lyrics by Haven Gillespie, published in 1934 by Leo Feist, Inc. The Songwriters Hall of Fame, which inducted Gillespie in 1972, records the circumstances. He had come to Manhattan from his brother Irwin’s funeral. His publisher wanted a children’s Christmas song and would not take no. Gillespie left the office and wrote the lyric on the subway about fifteen minutes later, and by the Hall of Fame’s account he never much warmed to it afterward, because the song and the funeral stayed joined together in his head.

The song reached the public through radio. The Catholic University of America’s account of it says the star Eddie Cantor needed a Christmas number for a live broadcast tied to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade that year, thought the thing sounded childish, and sang it because his wife told him to. What followed was not gradual. The university’s figures are 100,000 copies of sheet music sold within twenty four hours and another 300,000 by Christmas. The Songwriters Hall of Fame puts it at 25,000 copies a day. The numbers in the surviving accounts do not agree, which is normal for 1934, and they agree completely about the shape of it.

Read the lyric with a historian’s eye and you will find every part of the modern arrangement in it, assembled for the first time: a written record, a second pass over that record to sort one kind of child from the other, and a Santa who is aware of what children do when the adults are not in the room. Nobody had put those three things together in a form the whole country could sing. After 1934, everybody had.

Did Santa keep a list before that?

Not a list. But the rewarding and the punishing were already in print, in New York, a hundred and thirteen years earlier.

In 1821 a publisher named William B. Gilley issued a small paperback for children called The Children’s Friend: A New-Year’s Present, to the Little Ones from Five to Twelve. Nobody knows who wrote it or who drew it. Inside is an eight verse poem, “Old Santeclaus with Much Delight”, and it is the earliest known printing of Santa’s reindeer, his sleigh and his Christmas Eve arrival. Scans of the original, from the copy held at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, are on Wikimedia Commons, so you can look at the actual pages.

The sleigh in the first illustration carries a sign. The sign reads REWARDS.

The poem is entirely open about the bargain. Good children get toys and, in a nice period touch, improving literature: a doll, a peg top, a ball, and “pretty books to store their mind”. Children who have behaved badly get something else. The poem leaves them “a long, black, birchen rod”, which is a bundle of twigs, and which is not a metaphor.

And then it does something that almost nobody notices. It hands the rod to the parents. The rod, the poem says, is “Such as the dread command of God / Directs a Parent’s hand to use”. Even in 1821, in the harshest version of this story anyone published, Santa’s job was to deliver the verdict and somebody else’s job was to do anything about it. Whoever wrote that poem had firmer views on discipline than we do and still did not put the punishment in Santa’s hands.

What about “The Night Before Christmas”?

It does not mention behavior once.

“A Visit from St. Nicholas” appeared anonymously in the Troy Sentinel on 23 December 1823, and was later attributed to Clement Clarke Moore. It is the single most influential Santa text in the English language. It gives us the sleigh on the roof, the finger beside the nose, the pipe, the round belly and eight named reindeer, two of whom were still called Dunder and Blixem in that first printing rather than Donner and Blitzen. If you want the full team and what happened to those two names, we keep it on the reindeer names page.

What the poem does not contain is any judgment of anybody. There is no list. There is no good or bad. St. Nicholas arrives, fills the stockings without looking up, and leaves. He does not check anything, because in 1823 checking was not yet part of the job.

Where does the trail run out?

Earlier than anyone will admit.

Plenty of writing will tell you confidently that the naughty and nice ledger descends from older European customs around Saint Nicholas, in which well behaved children found treats in their shoes and the others found something less welcome. Those customs are real and they are old. What we have not been able to do is point you at an encyclopedic or primary source that dates the specific bookkeeping, the idea of a record being kept and consulted, to any particular moment before 1821. Folk practice mostly gets written down late, by somebody with a theory.

So here is the honest version. Two printed texts, 1821 and 1934, do almost all the work. Anyone who tells you exactly when Santa started keeping records is telling you a story, which in fairness is the family business.

Does knowing this help at home?

More than you would think, because it takes the weight off.

A list invented for a subway ride in 1934 is not a rule anyone has to enforce. It is a bit of Christmas furniture, and every household is entitled to arrange it however it likes. Most families we hear from run it as a standing joke rather than as an audit, which is the version we would pick too, and the 1821 poem quietly agrees with them about who is supposed to handle the discipline.

If a child wants to know where they stand, the naughty or nice list checker on this site will tell them, in the sense that it will make something up and print it on a ribbon. Everything on it lands on the nice side, deliberately. If the news is good and you would like it in writing, the nice list certificate prints on ordinary paper and looks far more official than it has any right to.

Xmas Naughty Or Nice Scanner does the same joke with a camera. A face goes in a candy-cane frame, a red line sweeps across it, and a ribbon unrolls a verdict such as 64 percent nice. Nothing is examined and nothing is measured; the number is invented, exactly like the one in the song. It is a small one-time purchase on iPhone and it is at its funniest pointed at a grandparent who has had a glass of sherry.

Ninety years of solemn national belief in a document that does not exist. Keep the joke, skip the audit, and remember that even the 1821 poet thought the rod was your department and not Santa’s.

Sources