What’s in a word? A lot, sometimes, especially if it concerns Christmas. If you’re still writing out your cards or mulling over how to text your greetings, read on.
Should you wish your friends that it be “merry” or “happy”? The queen, like her father and grandfather, avoids “merry”. In her long reign, there have only been four occasions when her Christmas address departed from that unwritten rule.
Tempted to save time by writing “Xmas”? The style books discourage it on formal grounds. But what of the people ready to accuse you of wanting to take the “Christ” out of Christmas? The history of banning Christmas, or being accused of wanting to do so, is almost as old as the history of its celebration.
Christmas as we think of it today – an important feast centred on the family and a turkey dinner – owes a lot to Charles Dickens. It’s his 1843 story about Ebeneezer Scrooge, A Christmas Carol, which popularised the phrase “Merry Christmas!”
Dickens didn’t invent it. It dates back to the end of the 17th century at least. But Dickens was the key influence, his story reshaping how the United Kingdom and its colonies imagined Christmas, including lunch.
Turkey was the gift that the reformed Scrooge sent to Bob Cratchit at the story’s heart-warming end; that fowl ended up displacing all the other fowls, game birds and meats that, up till then, had served as worthy Christmas fare.
“Happy Christmas” only began to catch on towards the end of the 19th century. It had a class inflection. “Merry” still bore some of its medieval connotations of tipsy revelry and raucous behaviour, associated with the lower classes. “Happy” suggested a contained, socially respectable Victorian joy.
In 1932, when King George V gave the first broadcast Christmas address on radio, he opted to wish his subjects a “happy Christmas”. His granddaughter, Elizabeth, has only departed from that rule in 1962, 1967, 1970 and 1999. (No one has satisfactorily explained the exceptions but I should point out that those four years are associated with claret vintages that call for merriment. You decide.)
As for “Happy Holidays”, it’s been in use for a century in the US. “Season’s Greetings” has been used since the late 19th century – as old as “Happy Christmas” and barely younger than the first commercial Christmas card (bearing “Merry Christmas”) printed by Henry Cole in 1843.
These days, however, the latter terms are mired in US politics just as the happy/merry distinction is entangled in British class distinctions.
In 2016, a research institute conducted a poll on whether businesses should greet customers with “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas”. Two-thirds of Democrats replied yes; two-thirds of Republicans replied no.
Warm wishes have been transformed into a badge of honour and identity, having less to do with what you wish to others and more with what you’d like others to think of you. Both positions, taken to a doctrinaire extreme, are puritanical and, like all puritanisms, have an amusing side.
Warm wishes have been transformed into a badge of honour and identity, having less to do with what you wish to others and more with what you’d like others to think of you- Ranier Fsadni
It is one thing to say “Happy Holidays” to someone you know isn’t Christian or who, like many eastern Christians, celebrates Christmas and the Epiphany according to the Julian calendar (January 7-19 according to the Gregorian one). It’s quite another to insist on leaving Christmas out of it even with religious and cultural Christians. At that point, it begins to sound like you’re wishing them well for a holiday you begrudge them.
Being in two minds about Christmas isn’t new among secular puritans. In Revolutionary France, the traditional Three Kings Cake was, for a while, called the Equality Cake – truly a case of wanting the cake and eating it.
Conservative religious puritans, however, are seeing ghosts when they claim that the use of “Xmas” is another example of secularists who want to eliminate “Christ” from the very word. “X” is, of course, the Greek letter ‘chi’, with which “Christ” begins.
“Xmas” is first recorded in the mid-18th century, although an earlier variant was used in a 12th-century Anglo-Saxon chronicle. By the mid-19th century, it can be found used in informal letters, including Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), an ordained Anglican deacon.
The real problem for conservatives, however, is that the banning of Christmas celebrations is entwined with the history of the feast. It was the English Puritans, in 1647, who banned the feasting – calling it a “popish festival” – and replaced it with fasting. The first pilgrims in the US continued to insist Christmas was a day of work.
The reaction to the Puritans was a politicisation of Christmas, with feasting coming to be associated with royalist support. The records we have of protests and revelry sound like a harbinger of Republican rallies for Christmas nowadays.
Yet, what is now defended as the essence of Christmas – the decorated trees, the Yule log, the candles of Advent, the feasting and drinking and carol singing – was historically associated with pagan feasts of Roman or Nordic origin. They were absorbed into the Christmas spirit only with the disapproval of certain bishops, such as Asterius of Amasea, who, in AD400, warned his congregation of the corrupting effects of giving generous gifts to carolling children.
The fact is that Puritanism, right or left, cannot make sense of Christmas. It is the anti-puritan feast par excellence. It absorbs cultural influences from everywhere. It reinterprets them to make them part of its story: Zoroastrianism in the magi; the legends of semi-divine emperors; the carnivalesque misrule of the Saturnalia and the Nordic feast of lights.
There is nothing puritan about a divinity that takes the form of a baby: a leaking, weeping beautiful mess, whose tiny hands and feet remind us that true strength lies in respecting weakness.