One important source of Christmas material that’s often overlooked is Washington Irving’s Old Chrustmas, which appears in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819-1820), thereby predating both Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas (1823) and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843). Irving describes Christmas traditions back in England. In the section entitled “The Christmas Dinner, he describes the toast:
The old gentleman’s whole countenance beamed with a serene look of indwelling delight, as he stirred this mighty bowl. Having raised it to his lips, with a hearty wish of a merry Christmas to all present, he sent it brimming, around the board, for every one to follow his example, according to the primitive style; pronouncing it “the ancient fountain of good feeling, where all hearts met together.”*
He also uses as an epigraph a section of a poem from George Withers’ Juvenalia (1626, 1633)
And if, for cold, it hap to die,
We'll bury't in a Christmas pye,
And evermore be merry.
The word “Merry” appears 18 times in Irving’s work, counting both Irving’s use and citations from old poems. He ends with:
Stranger and sojourner as I am in the land,—though for me no social hearth may blaze, no hospitable roof throw open its doors, nor the warm grasp of friendship welcome me at the threshold,—yet I feel the influence of the season beaming into my soul from the happy looks of those around me. Surely happiness is reflective, like the light of heaven; and every countenance, bright with smiles, and glowing with innocent enjoyment, is a mirror transmitting to others the rays of a supreme and ever shining benevolence. He who can turn churlishly away from contemplating the felicity of his fellow beings, and sit down darkling and repining in his loneliness when all around is joyful, may have his moments of strong excitement and selfish gratification, but he wants the genial and social sympathies which constitute the charm of a merry Christmas.
If we had been saying that as the standard for 200 years, it would just sound fine to us, and “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year” would seem the strange thing to our ears.
Usage determines language, which is why prescriptivists are unhappy all the time.
I think this is a lot of it. In contexts where it’s solely a Christmas greeting that people are giving to one another (with no mention of new year), ‘happy Christmas’ is quite common where I live.
Of course. I’m only suggesting the flip for amusement, and a good party conversation starter.
No doubt. I sometimes get curious about the series of events that lead to odd sayings. Sort of like the “park on a driveway and drive on a parkway,” or calling it a cell phone when it does so much more, and some people exclusively text.
I was just riffing off your comment, because, as you just said, English is full of usages that had an understood base and context in the past that virtually no one today remembers. And English is full of near-synonyms that native speakers unconsciously learn when to use and not use, although new learners get caught on them. And full of basic words that have accreted multiple, and sometimes seemingly unrelated, meanings over time.
I looked up park, for the fun of it. In the noun sense of wooded recreation area, it comes from Old French and probably Old German, meaning enclosed lot, same source as paddock. In the verb sense of placing items in a location, it was a military term for filling a enclosed lot with weapons. Then it expanded to placing other items (e.g. park your carcass"), and started being associated with vehicles in the 19th century. Not much later came the parkway for a vehicle path through a park or with bordering trees. You move your vehicle - drive - on a parkway. You stop your moving vehicle - park - on a vehicle path from the street to your parade, a driveway. The terms are not at all oxymoronic; we’ve just forgotten their origins.
For all the foofaraw about too rapidly changing language, the truth is that the majority of language lingers, usually for centuries, even when the world changes and makes their origins obsolete. Like “cell phone.”
I suspect that, in modern American English, at least, a large percentage of usage of “merry” as an adverb is specifically as a modifier to “Christmas.”
I am very dubious about any supposedly logical explanation of why people say “happy Christmas” or “merry Christmas” based on subtle differences between the connotations or of the words “happy” or “merry”. It’s purely a matter of convention and what people are used to hearing in their local speech community. In Ireland we are used to saying “Happy Christmas”; I defy anyone to infer that Irish people remain sober at Christmas.
I have always interpreted “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year” as: have a merry time during the Christmas period festivities and may your coming year be a happy one.
It doesn’t work if you change around use of happy and merry. Using happy twice wrecks the prose.
Merry certainly still gets used as a euphemism for drunk. Although it isn’t required that you be drunk for the festivities. Lots of euphemisms in British culture. “Tired and emotional” being my favourite. Coined by Private Eye magazine when directly calling out politicians or other public figures for being drunk got them into hot water.
In the UK, a cashier at Lidl said “Merry Christmas” to me today.
We did exchange a few words and I had on my grey baseball cap with the grey and black US flag on it, yet she didn’t seem like she was wavering on “Happy” or “Merry”
On leaving an Optician’s office the other day, I found myself saying “Happy Holidays”
Certainly it is now. There might have been some connotational distinction for the phrase becoming popular originally, but now people just say what’s conventional.
May you have a pleasant a joyous holiday season and vacation from work, if you get one.
“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!”
…
He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!
“Make several incisions into the rind of a lemon; stick cloves in these incisions, and roast the said lemon by the fire. Put small but equal quantities of cinnamon, mace, cloves, and allspice, and a race of ginger, into a saucepan, with half a pint of water; let it boil until it be reduced one half. Boil one bottle of port wine; burn a portion of the spirit out of it, by applying a lighted taper to the saucepan which contains it. Put the roasted lemons and spice into the wine; stir it up well, and let it stand near the fire ten minutes. Rub a few nobs of sugar on the rind of a lemon; put the sugar into a bowl or jug, with the juice of half a lemon, (not roasted) pour the wine upon it, sweeten it to your taste, and serve it up with the lemon and spice floating in it.”
— Apician Anecdotes or Tales of the Table, Kitchen, and Larder by Dick Humelbergius Secundus, 1836
Criminy. I’d vaguely heard of John Fisher (he’s in Wolf Hall, IIRC) but he had an eventful life. He was nearly assassinated by poisoned porridge (for which his cook was sentenced to be boiled alive); his house was targeted by a cannonball fired by the Boleyns, and he was executed by beheading (five years before Thomas Cromwell). It was interesting times. Merry Christmas, indeed.
I reckon for me the deal killer is “roasting lemons by an open fire”, if reducing Porto (Dunno if ‘port wine’ is sold) isn’t. And all those spices, most of which I don’t have.
Similar spices and cheap mulled wine and whatever liquor you’ve on hand go into Scandinavian glögg (glug). After one or two, you’ll be in happy-merry land.
The British aren’t known for being genteel and polite at Christmas. And that goes back centuries