Four Christmas Phrases Everyone Repeats Have A Documented Paper Trail
Shops start playing carols and stacking tins of biscuits weeks before December even arrives, which makes Christmas the longest-running seasonal hook of the year. The phrases that travel with it, from a bishop's 1534 letter to a 1977 political jibe, have a better paper trail than most people assume.
Shops have already found room for the tinsel and the tins of shortbread, weeks before anyone has carved a single pumpkin. Christmas has the longest seasonal run-up of any hook in the calendar, which means its stock phrases get months of use before the day arrives. Four of the most repeated ones carry more documented history than their cheerful wrapping suggests.
A Greeting With A Paper Trail
Merry Christmas is first recorded in 1534, when Bishop John Fisher used it in a letter to Thomas Cromwell. That is three centuries before it became the default greeting it is now. The phrase owes its later ubiquity to a single piece of stationery: the first commercial Christmas card, sent by Sir Henry Cole in 1843, which read “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You.” A printed card with a ready-made phrase on it, sent by the thousand, did more to fix the wording in everyday speech than any sermon could.
What The Carol Actually Wishes You
The carol title God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen is usually misheard in one particular way: people assume “merry gentlemen” is the pairing, as if the carol is simply describing cheerful men. It isn’t. In the original grammar, “merry” belongs with “rest,” not with “gentlemen.” The line means “God keep you in happiness,” addressed to gentlemen, rather than “God rest you, merry gentlemen” describing their mood. You can see the full explanation at God rest you merry gentlemen.
The underlying blessing is far older than the carol itself. “Rest ye merry” turns up as early as 1300, in the romance Floris and Blauncheflur, as a stock phrase of goodwill. The carol that built on it is thought to date from the Tudor period, but nobody actually printed it down until 1760, which leaves a gap of two centuries or more where it presumably just circulated by ear, the way carols tend to.
The Bird That Never Gets A Vote
Turkey has sat on English Christmas tables since the Tudor period, available in Britain from 1573 onward, long before anyone thought to make a joke out of it. The joke itself is much younger and much more precisely dated. Turkeys voting for Christmas is credited to the British Liberal politician David Penhaligon, who used it in 1977 to describe his party’s uneasy support for the Lib-Lab Pact: “Us voting for the Pact is like a turkey voting for Christmas.” It took a real, centuries-old dinner tradition and turned it into a shorthand for any group backing a decision that plainly works against its own interests, and it has stayed in political use ever since.
An Older Kind Of Indulgence
The instruction to eat, drink and be merry did not start life as festive advice at all. It comes from Ecclesiastes, where King Solomon weighs up the point of human effort and lands on a fairly resigned conclusion: “Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry.” That is a philosopher’s shrug about the limits of ambition, not a toast. Centuries of Christmas dinners have quietly repurposed it into an invitation rather than a concession, which is arguably an improvement.
Four phrases, one season, and between them a bishop’s letter, an uncredited medieval romance, a 1977 political dig and a line from the Old Testament. Not bad company for something people usually just blurt out on their way to a second helping of stuffing.