"Christmas is conspicuously the only time of year when the word
“merry” receives heavy use. The greeting “Merry Christmas” dates back to at
least 1565, in which year the author of the Hereford
Municipal Manuscript wrote “And thus I comytt you to god, who send
you a mery Christmas & many.” Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, pushed
it forward, as did industrialization: The first commercially sold Christmas
card (also printed in 1843) contained the salutation “A Merry Christmas and a
Happy New Year to You.”
Yet “Merry Christmas” did not gain universal support. The Night Before Christmas (Clement
C. Moore’s, I mean, not Nikolai
Gogol’s) ends with the words, “A Happy Christmas to all and to all a good
night.” Queen Elizabeth II wishes British subjects a “Happy Christmas” in her
annual Christmas broadcasts, and the phrase enjoys a broad general currency the
U.K.
What accounts for the difference? Queen Elizabeth, a woman of
serious low-church piety, is said to prefer “happy” to “merry” because she
dislikes “merry’s” connotation of boisterousness, even slight intoxication.
(Similarly, in Holland some of the more strictly reformed Dutch prefer Zalig Kerstfeest—“Blessed
Christmas”–to Vrolijk
Kerstmis—“Merry Christmas.”)
This moral suspicion of “Merry Christmas” dates back to the
Methodist churchmen of the Victorian era who sought to promote sobriety among
the English working class. Merrymaking of the ancient, alcoholic sort was
frowned on year-round, perhaps never more so than during the celebration of the
Savior’s birth. The phrase “Merry Christmas” would hang on, but the image of a
family sharing a bottle of port or wine in the first commercial Christmas card
was to give way to more temperate holiday depictions.
We may no longer associate “merry” with spirits alcoholic as
well as high, but the meaning was once familiar. “Merry” appeared in both the
Wyclife and King James bibles in reference to intoxication, where it describes
an evening in the life of the rich man Nabal: “He held a feast in his house,
like the feast of a king; and Nabal’s heart was merry within him, for he was
very drunken.” (To wish someone a holiday feast like Nabal’s was to wish him a
very good Christmas indeed.)
To certain ears, then, “Happy Christmas” conveys a sober,
well-earned enjoyment, the satisfaction resulting from hard work and virtuous
living. “Merry Christmas” stirs in us an impulse more primitive and
unrestrained: The childlike giddiness of Christmas morning, the rush down the
stairs and tearing at paper, the intemperate delight in gifts long hoped-for
and wholly undeserved.
Which phrase conveys a more fitting response to the
overwhelming, unearned, gift of Christ’s birth? Suffice it to say that when our
Lord comes I hope I do not greet him with dignified reserve but instead rush at
him with the unguarded, unembarrassed joy of a child at play or man at his
cups. Merry Christmas to all!"
