Because I'm out in Vietnam, where Christmas is not an official holiday, I spent Christmas morning working. No one was particularly happy to be there, but we greeted each other with the obligatory "Merry Christmas".
An Irish co-worker made a point of saying "Happy Christmas", and he pointed out to me that in Britain and Ireland, they say "Happy Christmas" instead of "Merry Christmas". *
"Then what do you say for New Year?" I asked.
"Happy New Year," he answered.
"You use happy for both Christmas and New Year?" I said. "What a strange country!"
"Actually the way we say it on our side of the pond is the correct way," he said. "The only reason you Americans say 'Merry Christmas' is because of an old Coca-Cola advertising campaign."
I was skeptical, but I didn't argue at the time. Stranger things have turned out to be true. But as soon as I got home, I googled it.
Turns out, he was completely wrong. The American merry Christmas is in fact the older version. See Wikipedia which traces "Merry Christmas and a happy new year" to 1699.
As for Happy Christmas?
The alternative "Happy Christmas" gained usage in the late 19th century, and in the United Kingdom and Ireland is a common spoken greeting, along with "Merry Christmas." One reason may be the Victorian middle-class influence in attempting to separate wholesome celebration of the Christmas season from public insobriety and associated asocial behaviour, at a time when merry also meant 'intoxicated' – Queen Elizabeth II is said to have preferred "Happy Christmas" for this reason.[64] In her annual Christmas messages to the Commonwealth, Queen Elizabeth used "Happy Christmas" far more often than "Merry Christmas."[71] The latter was used only four times during her reign: in 1962, 1967, 1970 and 1999;[72] "Happy Christmas" was used on almost every broadcast since 1956.
So, once again, the American version turns out to be the correct version after all.
(It turns out that in many cases the colonials did a better job of preserving Elizabethan English than did the mother country. More often than not, when British terminology and American terminology are different, it is the American version that turns out to be the older form. In The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson lists several examples of British pundits complaining about vulgar Americanism infiltrating the language, but then Bryson goes on to show that in each case the vulgar new Americanism they're complaining about is in fact the older form.)
Interesting that my Irish colleague was so convinced that "Merry Christmas" was created by Coca-Cola. I wonder how widespread that belief is on the other side of the pond?
Notes
* Actually, I don't think this is my first time learning about this little difference. I feel like this is something I must have already learned before at one point, and then just forgotten. I've been interacting with the Brits and the Irish since 2001. I must have had this conversation before.
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