MERRY CHRISTMAS WAS THEN ‘SOMETHING THE UNCOUTH MASSES SHOUTED AS THEY TRAVELLED IN DRUNKEN MOBS.’

It’s hard to deny that the words, “merry” and “Christmas,” when spoken together with the right rhythm, create a certain music that pleases the ear. be sullied by such revelry. It was not until the 19th century that Christmas was entirely restored as a welcome ritual, and was indeed consider- ably redefined in the popular imagination, owing to the work of Charles Dickens and others, as an occasion for harmonious family gathering and generosity.

The value of conviviality is a lesson Ebenezer Scrooge learns in A Christmas Carol, published in 1843. And so it’s not coincidence that the phrase should recur frequently throughout the novella, signifying not liber- tine cheer but simple mirth and good-natured jolliness. “A merry Christmas, Bob!” Scrooge tells Cratchit, upon returning from his night of harrowing revelation. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year!”

The very same year that Dickens published his Christmas Carol, the Summerly’s Home Treasury Office of Old Bond street in London created a card that could be posted in the mail to wish family or pound of the words “halig” had the flavour of rapacious and “daeg” — “holy” and “day” inclusion we see in advertising — yoked together in that fashion and Christmastime as far back as the 10th century, marketing campaigns today: or perhaps even earlier. “happy holidays,” despite As the centuries elapsed so Advent import, has less obvious too did that “a” develop into Christian associations, an “o,” until, in the 16th century, and seems — to merchants we find the first recorded eager to maximize the scope use of “holy-day” as one word, of their clientele — the safer, combined neatly with an “i” more comprehensive yuletide into the word we use today. phrase. It’s less a matter The word referred expressly of alienating the pious than to any day of religious observance of endeavouring to be hospitable that, according to the to those who are not. Oxford English Dictionary, Of course, the religious exempted one from “labour have long had reason to regard or toil,” hence the evolution of holiday merriment with the sense of “holiday” as a vacation skepticism, and have wished, or break from work. perhaps justly, to protect

At Christmas, we don’t the sanctity of Christmas tend to wish others a “happy from the compromising interests holiday,” as we might imagine of those who would we would if the holy day in seek to appropriate it as a question was merely December non-denominational affair. 25th, the work-free Over the course of the 20th birthday of Jesus Christ. That century, the Christmas season is because “happy holidays” has transformed steadily originated as a way to ex- into a commercial enterprise, press gratitude and courtesy with malls and department around the Advent. The Advent stores leading the consumerfriendly is a cycle on the Christian charge. In a slightly calendar that includes ironic twist, this an unconscious not only Christmas Day but social reinvention is the Epiphany on the first much of the order of the one Dickens and his contemporaries orchestrated a century earlier, only this time it’s fixated less on self-improvement and camaraderie and more on giving and receiving gifts. But even this potted history begins at once to smack of the sort of rhetoric that’s almost as long seemed a boring cliché. Wherever Santa Claus takes prominence over the nativity, someone will complain that we’ve lost the true meaning of Christmas.

Semantics spoil the gesture, when all you want is to be affable, and idle would it be to get too invested in what either phrase, in any ordinary social context, really means. Language evolves. In the case of “merry Christmas” and “happy holidays,” it has evolved to the point of nondescript, perfunctory salutation, of no more serious consequence in its particulars than when the man on the customer-service helpline asks “how may I assist you?” It means an ounce of fellow-feeling and a need to keep transactions moving, plus maybe the scarcest shade of festive spirit owing to the decorations and snow on the ground — nothing more, nothing less.

Deck the halls, as they say, with boughs of holly, that are themselves as Christian or not as you want them to be. Tradition has not been distorted or perverted, in any case. God (or Santa) bless us, every one.

There is something different, but similarly pleasing about the alliterative pairing of “happy” and “holidays.”

Perhaps the endurance of these two phrases is due to the pleasant sound they create; charming in ways that “merry holidays” and “happy Christmas” — other than to the English — simply are not. Expressions of greeting and courtesy, “merry Christmas” and “happy holidays” can be thought of as seasonal variations on the usual diplomatic clichés. Like “how’s it going” or “have a nice day,” they have an automatic quality, uttered as a reflex to punctuate the beginning and end of civil conversation.

Unsurprisingly, they may be heard most often where repetitious chit-chat and mechanical politesse forever reign supreme: the shopping mall and the friendly stores within, which have developed philosophies of cordial inoffensive idiom more sophisticated than the layman can hope to comprehend. For the retail worker in December, season’s greetings are an art.

The origins of “merry Christmas” are obscure. Etymologists agree that the first friends greetings of the season. Sunday after January first. In recorded use of the expression The card bears two blank other words, “happy holidays” is the one listed still in spaces for the names of both was never intended to reference the Oxford English Dictionary: sender and recipient and a single holy-day, but “And this our Lord God a group of British revellers rather several in succession. sends you a merry Christmas, sharing a toast with glasses of When we compare the meaning and a comfortable, to your wine at a restaurant table. “A and significance of “merry heart’s desire,” the English Merry Christmas and a Happy Christmas” and “happy holidays,” Catholic bishop John Fisher New Year To You,” it reads as it seems clear that the wrote to lawyer and Reformation the world’s first official Christ- latter, at least in historical and advocate Thomas mas Card, and the beginning etymological terms, is the decidedly Cromwell in a letter dated of a worldwide phenomenon more devout. After all, the 22nd of December, 1534. that would help immortalize would not true faith call for In this period, Christmas the phrase. The coincidence the exaltation of the broader was celebrated in the traditional suggests “merry Christmas” spiritual spread? pagan fashion, with was already common enough “Happy Holidays” came music and ample drink, and parlance in the era, or at least to be used as an alterna- to the extent that “merry familiar enough that the readers tive to “merry Christmas” Christmas” gained purchase of 19th century England almost as soon as “merry at the time as a salutation, it would know what it meant. Christmas” was standardized. was not so much a gesture of Still, at the time, Queen Victoria— An advertisement for pious faith as a toast to the perhaps sensitive to all a children’s toy store pub- convivial spirit of the season. that “merry” might connote — lished in the Philadelphia As historian Neil J. Young elected to wish her subjects a Inquirer in 1863 declares, observed last year in the L.A. “happy Christmas” in her annual in all caps, that “HAPPY Times, “merry Christmas” address. HOLIDAYS ARE COMING!”, was then “something the uncouth Well, happiness is agreeable and that we should there- masses shouted as they to all sensibilities, even fore make haste to shop travelled in drunken mobs.” those by which merriment for presents, while an ad in

In the 17th century, the offends. But what about the the Duluth News-Tribune, Puritans, contemptuous of “holidays” for which we are circa 1890, laments “HAPPY how profane the holiday had wishing others such a nice HOLIDAYS — ALAS, THEY become, banned Christmas time? The word “holiday,” as HAVE COME AND GONE, altogether, ordaining that December you will might have guessed, AND NOW LET US SETTLE 25th be a working day derives from the Old English DOWN TO BUSINESS.” It and that the birth of Jesus not word “haligdaeg,” a com- seems that this early use