Biography of merry christmas

“A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You” was the verse that was shown on the first commercially available Christmas card in Christmases has been merry long before that though.

The use of ‘Merry Christmas’ as a seasonal salutation dates back to at least , when, on 22nd December, John Fisher wished the season’s greetings in a letter to Thomas Cromwell, recorded in Strype Ecclesiastical memorials, ):

And this our Lord God send you a mery Christmas, and a comfortable, to your heart’s desire.

was the date of the publication of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol and it was around that time, in the early part of the reign of Queen Victoria, that Christmas as we now know it was largely invented.

The word merry was then beginning to take on its current meaning of ‘jovial, and outgoing’ (and, let’s face it, probably mildly intoxicated). Prior to that, in the times when other ‘merry’ phrases were coined, for example, make merry (circa ), Merry England (circa