Holidays Greetings include Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Season's Greetings, Happy Holidays, Happy Thanksgiving

Holidays Greetings include Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Season's Greetings, Happy Holidays and Happy Thanksgiving
Holiday greetings are a selection of greetings that are often spoken with good intentions to strangers, family, friends, or other people during the months of December and January. Holidays with greetings include Christmas, New Year's Day, Thanksgiving (in the USA), and (more recently) Hanukkah, Ramadan, and Kwanzaa in the United States. 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. When one wishes to convey a greeting to another regardless of which particular holiday the other may personally observe, the collective phrase "Happy Holidays" is often used as a simple way to refer to all of the winter holidays, or to the three major American holidays of Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, and New Year's Day. However, some controversy has aroused regarding the phrase "Happy Holidays" as an alleged attempt to diminish Christmas.

Merry/Happy Christmas - The greetings and farewells "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Christmas" are traditionally used in North America, the United Kingdom, and Ireland beginning a few weeks prior to the Christmas holiday on December 25 of every year. "Merry" dominates in the United States; "happy" in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

The phrase is often proffered when it is known that the receiver is a Christian or celebrates Christmas. In the beginning of the 21st century, as Christians in increasingly multi-cultural societies continue becoming more sensitive to and respectful of non-Christians and non-Christian faiths, the phrase has become somewhat less ubiquitous than it was in the 20th century. (However, the commercialization of the actual holiday continues unabated.) The nonreligious sometimes 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.

As of 2005, this greeting still remains popular among countries with large Christian populations, including, among others, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and Mexico. It also remains popular in non-Christian areas such as the People's Republic of China and Japan, where Christmas is still widely celebrated due to Western influences. Though it has somewhat decreased in popularity in the United States and Canada over the past decades, polls from 2005 indicate that it is more popular than "Happy Holidays" or other alternatives.

History of the phrase - "Merry", derived from the Old English myrige, originally meant merely "pleasant" rather than joyous or jolly (as in the phrase "merry month of May").

Though Christmas has been celebrated since the 4th century AD, the first known usage of any Christmastime greeting, "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 appeared in the first Christmas card, produced in England in 1843, and in the popular secular carol "We Wish You a Merry Christmas."

The then relatively new term "Merry Christmas" figured prominently in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol in 1843. The cynical Ebenezer Scrooge rudely deflects the friendly greeting and broods on the foolishness of those who utter it. "If I could work my will", says Scrooge, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding." After the Spirits of Christmas effect his transformation, he is able to heartily exchange the wish with all he meets. The continued popularity of A Christmas Carol and the Victorian era Christmas traditions it typifies have led some to credit Dickens with popularizing, or even originating, the phrase "Merry Christmas".

The alternative "Happy Christmas" gained wide usage in the late 19th century, and is still common in the United Kingdom and Ireland. One reason may be the alternative meaning, still current there, of "merry" as "tipsy" or "drunk". Queen Elizabeth II is said to prefer "Happy Christmas" for this reason. In 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 editions to "Merry Christmas to all", perhaps indicating the relative popularity of the phrases in the United States.