Editorial
Front Page - Friday, December 24, 2010
I Swear...
And a merry ho-ho to you, too! (Hic)
Vic Fleming
Someone came up to me at an event a week or two ago and said, “Merry Christmas.” Just as I was about to respond, “Happy Holidays,” he added, “The heck with ‘Happy Holidays,’ I say, ‘Merry Christmas’!”
That got me to thinking about the various holiday “greetings” that float through the atmosphere this time of year.
And about “Merry Christ-mas” in particular.
I might have done nothing but think about it had I not heard a segment on “This American Life” wherein a Jewish fellow was sharing a home movie he had made as a child, in which his mother and his aunt were heard singing, “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,” as they prepared a Hanukkah meal.
My sources, which include, but are not limited to, Wikipedia, The Phrase Finder and my memory, indicate that “merry” comes from an Old English word that originally meant agreeable or pleasant and then later shifted to take on a slightly broader connotation.
The year 1565 gives us the first known appearance of a Christmas greeting as such. The cited source is “The Hereford Municipal Manuscript.” Hereford is a town on the Wye River in England, so I assume that this was some sort of forerunner of the newspaper, which is not recognized as having been invented until the next century.
“And thus I comytt you to God, who send you a mery Christmas” (sic) is how that greeting read, and I don’t know who the “I” or the “you” was in the excerpt. And I assume “comytt” is an early version of “commit”: ditto as to “mery” and “merry.”
The phrase “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You” appeared in 1843 on what is referred to as the first commercially available Christmas card. That same year Dickens came out with his short novel, “A Christmas Carol,” in which Scrooge famously rants about idiots who go about with “Merry Christmas” on their lips.
This was during the reign of Queen Victoria, and it was then that Christmas, as we largely know it today (and we do largely know it, don’t we?), was beginning to take shape.
By then also, the word “merry,” meaningwise, had begun to take on aspects of joviality, outgoingness and revelry. Many hold that the distilled spirits of that day and time were far safer than the water, so consumption of alcoholic beverages was not at all unusual.
How the carol “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” came to be heard by people of a later time as “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen” (compare comma placement) is a topic for a whole other column. Suffice it to say that “rest you merry” was a recognized phrase, as per a 1548 dictionary, meaning essentially to “remain content,” as in the phrase “rest assured.” That same dictionary, though, ascribed the phrase to “the vulgare people” (sic).
The point, though, is that the song has nothing to do with either resting or gentlemen who are agreeable and pleasant!
“Happy Christmas” gained a foothold in the U.K. in the late nineteenth century, by which time “merry” was understood to mean “tipsy,” if not “drunk.”
Some say that this was intentional on the part of “the Methodist Victorian middle-class,” who wished to “separate their construct of wholesome celebration of the Christmas season” from lower-class “asocial behavior,” such as “public insobriety.”
In conclusion, I’d like to point out that I personally recall the 1958 episode of “I’ve Got a Secret” when a Miss X, from Shelby, N.C., came on the show. And Henry Moore successfully guessed her secret, which she had whispered to Garry Moore: “My name is Merry Christmas.”
And she appeared to be sober as a judge!
Vic Fleming is a district court judge in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he also teaches at the William H. Bowen School of Law. Contact him at vicfleming@att.net.
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