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- Happy New Year redirects here. For other meanings see Happy New Year (disambiguation).
Holiday greetings are a selection of greetings that are often spoken with good intentions to strangers, family, or friends, in nations around the world, during the months of December and January.
Holidays with greetings include Christmas, New Year's Day, Chinese New Year, Thanksgiving (United States), and Hanukkah. Some greetings are more prevalent than others, depending on the cultural and religious status of any given area.
Typically, a greeting consists of the word "Happy" followed by the holiday, such as "Happy Hanukkah" or "Happy New Year", although the phrase "Merry Christmas" is a notable exception.
In the United States, the collective phrase "Happy Holidays" is often used as a generic cover-all greeting for all of the Winter holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, New Year's Day, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.
[edit]Merry/Happy Christmas
The greetings and farewells "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Christmas" are traditionally used in North America, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia, commencing a few weeks prior to Christmas (December 25) of every year.
The phrase is often preferred when it is known that the receiver is a Christian or celebrates Christmas. The nonreligious often use the greeting as well, however in this case its meaning focuses more on the secular aspects of Christmas, rather than the Nativity of Jesus.
Its meanings and variations are:
- As "Merry Christmas," the traditionally used greeting for those from America and the UK, composed of merry (jolly, happy) and Christmas (Old English: Cristes mæsse, for Christ's Mass).
- As "Merry Xmas," usually used to avoid the length of "Merry Christmas," with the "X" (sometimes controversially) replacing "Christ." (see Xmas) However, "X" is actually the Greek abbreviation for Christ, although this is not well known.
- As "Happy Christmas," an equivalent that is commonly used in the United Kingdom and Ireland, as well as "Merry Christmas."
As of 2005, "Merry Christmas" remains popular among countries with large Christian populations, including, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, South Africa, Mexico, Philippines, and parts of Western Europe not affiliated with the Eastern Orthodox rites.
It remains popular in the largely non-Christian nations of People's Republic of China and Japan, where Christmas is celebrated primarily due to Western cultural influences. Though it has somewhat decreased in popularity in the United States and Canada over the past decades, polls from 2005 indicate that it remains more popular than "Happy Holidays" or other alternatives.[1]
[edit]History of the phrase
A Christmas tree inside a home.
"Merry," derived from the Old English myrige, originally meant merely "pleasant, and agreeable" rather than joyous or jolly (as in the phrase "merry month of May").[2]
Though Christmas has been observed since the 4th century AD, the first known usage of any Christmastime greeting, dates back to 1565, when it appeared in The Hereford Municipal Manuscript:"And thus I comytt you to God, who send you a mery Christmas."[2] "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year" (thus incorporating two greetings) was in an informal letter written by an English admiral in 1699. The same phrase is contained in the sixteenth century secular English carol "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," and the first commercial Christmas card, produced in England in 1843.
Also in 1843, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol was published, during the mid Victorian revival of the holiday. The word Merry was then beginning to take on its current meaning of "jovial, cheerful, jolly and outgoing."[2] "Merry Christmas" in this new context figured prominently in A Christmas Carol. The cynicalEbenezer Scrooge rudely deflects the friendly greeting: "If I could work my will.. every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding."[3] After the visit from the Ghosts of Christmas effects his transformation, Scrooge exclaims; "I am as merry as a school-boy. A merry Christmas to everybody!" and heartily exchanges the wish to all he meets.[4] The instant popularity of A Christmas Carol, the Victorian era Christmas traditions it typifies, and the term's new meaning appearing in the book, Dickens' tale popularized the phrase "Merry Christmas."[5][6]
The alternative "Happy Christmas" gained usage in the late 19th century, and is still common in the U.K. and Ireland alongside "Merry Christmas". One reason may be the Methodist Victorian middle-class influence in attempting to separate their construct of wholesome celebration of the Christmas season from that of common lower-class public insobriety and associated asocial behaviour, in a time where merry was also understood to mean "tipsy" or "drunk". Queen Elizabeth II is said to prefer "Happy Christmas" for this reason.[2] In the American poet Clement Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (1823), the final line, originally written as "Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night," has been changed in many later editions to "Merry Christmas to all," perhaps indicating the relative popularity of the phrases in the U.S.
[edit]Happy Holidays
In the United States, "Happy Holidays" (along with the similarly generalized "Season's Greetings") has become the most common holiday greeting in the public sphere within the past decade,[citation needed] such as department stores, public schools and greeting cards. Its use is generally confined to the period between United States Thanksgiving and New Year's. Commercial use of the term "Happy Holidays" dates back at least to the 1970s. Use of the term may have originated with the Irving Berlin song "Happy Holiday" (released in 1942 and included in the film White Christmas).
In the United States, it can have several variations and meanings:
- As "Happy Holiday", an English translation of the Hebrew Hag Sameach greeting on Passover, Sukkot, and Shavuot.
- As "Happy Holiday", a substitution for "Merry Christmas".
- As "Happy Holidays", a collective and inclusive wish for the period encompassing Thanksgiving, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Winter solstice, Christmas Day (The Nativity of the Lord),Boxing Day (St. Stephen's Day), the New Year and Epiphany.
- As "Happy Holidays", a shortened form of the greeting "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year."
Advocates claim that "Happy Holidays" is an 'inclusive' greeting that is not intended as an attack on Christianity or other religions, but is rather a response to the reality of a growing non-Christian population.
Critics of "Happy Holidays" generally claim it is a secular neologism. The greeting may be deemed materialistic, consumerist, atheistic, indifferentist, agnostic, politically correct, and/or anti-Christian. It may be associated with the "War on Christmas," with the intent of deliberately diminishing the centrality of Christianity and advancing secularism.[7]
Some Christians, concerned that the 20th-century conflation of St. Nicholas Day (December 6), Christmas (December 25), and Epiphany(January 6) has subsumed the meaning of Christmas itself, have taken to using "Happy Holidays" and "Season's Greetings" throughout the season, reserving "Merry Christmas" for December 25.
