Why “Merry” Christmas?

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

It’s Jeff Weiss from Dallas, Texas.

Jeff, hi.

Hi, Jeff, how you doing?

I’m doing great.

What’s going on?

Well, I have a question that I’ve been pursuing like the white whale for 19 years that I hope you guys have a good answer for.

Oh, my goodness.

Definitely. Park that boat at a pier and we’ll help.

Well, I’m a reporter for the Dallas Morning News.

And 19 years ago, I was given the assignment to do a feature story on the 150th anniversary of the first Christmas card, pre-printed Christmas card.

And it’s a beautiful little postcard thing that was published in England.

And on it, it said, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

And it occurred to me that that greeting, that particular formulation, obviously had a long history.

And it got me wondering why, at least in modern American language,

Why Christmas must be merry, but nothing else can be.

You would never say merry birthday or merry anniversary or even merry new year,

But if you do blank Christmas, there really isn’t anything that goes there but merry.

So why is it, in common American speech, merry is Christmas and only Christmas?

You can find out a few things about Mary that I think will give you an answer if you look in these large corpora, these large bodies of text that I often talk about on the show.

And what you’re going to find is that Mary’s heyday is a word that was widely used by Americans, was the 1800s.

And it has rapidly been declining ever since.

And a Mary generally means exuberant or very happy or joyful.

Yeah, it’s a kind of animated enjoyment.

Yeah, it seems a little odd to the modern ear because we’re not quite sure that Christmas should be merry, right?

We’re a little suspicious of the idea that you’re supposed to be having fun.

And yet the Christmas celebrations, we are moderate compared to what they’ve been in the past with the drunken revelry and the dancing on tape.

I mean, Christmas celebrations have traditionally been out of hand, like frat parties, you know?

Which doesn’t sound merry to me. It sounds dangerous.

Well, you know.

Well, it’s cognate with the word mirth, too.

Mary and mirth are from the same root.

And I think it’s always kind of connoted that kind of laughter and joyousness.

Different from happy.

Yeah, don’t get the eggnog next to the candle and you’ll be fine.

So, yeah, you’re right.

Mary is a word that mainly, and I have a little footnote here in a second,

Mainly is associated with Christmas in American English today.

It’s just what has happened.

Mary has fallen out of use.

However, you might say something like the lightning played merry hell with my electronics, right?

Meaning that the lightning had…

And the other exception I thought about is somebody did something terrible and then went upon their merry way.

Exactly.

Good point.

But in most cases, both cases, you don’t actually mean merry.

Right.

And there’s another one of those kind of not quite merry uses of merry, which is the cat led the dog on a merry chase around the yard, right?

Yes.

Well, and Robin Hood and his merry men.

I mean, they must have been a lot of fun, right?

They were.

And merry-go-round.

Yeah.

If you go back far enough, you can find other examples,

And you’ll see merry old England.

But these are all used in intentionally archaic or sometimes ironic fashion.

Exactly.

A little fossilized, right?

Nobody ever looked at me and says, have a merry birthday.

Right.

No, you don’t do that.

You don’t do that anymore.

But there was a time that you would.

You can look in any newspaper archive of the 1800s

And see that Mary was widely used.

But, you know, you’re perceptive.

You figure Mary’s kind of fossilized almost.

Yeah, God resty Mary gentleman.

It’s not archaic yet, and it’s not obsolete,

But I wouldn’t be surprised at 100 years if it is.

Preserved just in those carols and things.

Thanks for calling.

Jeff, if you see the whale, let us know.

This is all off the record, by the way.

I will do that.

Thank you very much.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So you’ll make us happy if you call us at 877-929-9673,

Or you can send your emails to words@waywordradio.org.