Did you do like The Donald – give “Happy Holidays” the heave-ho and wish everybody “Merry Christmas”?
Back on the campaign trail, Trump promised he’d end the “liberal war on Christmas” and reprise “Merry Christmas!” (I never knew the greeting was gone.)
The president finds reading history — or anything else substantive — too heavy a burden. But history instructs that “Merry Christmas!” was once synonymous with drunkenness and debauchery.
“Irony is wasted on the stupid,” Oscar Wilde famously observed.
The Atlantic’s David Frum tweeted this interesting factoid on Dec. 25:
In the 19th century, genteel Britons began wishing each other "Happy Christmas" rather than "Merry Christmas" because "merry" was understood to mean "drunk off your face."
— David Frum (@davidfrum) December 25, 2019
Added the conservative pundit, author and Never-Trumper:
Worse — per the Oxford English Dictionary — in the 17th & 18th centuries ‘merry’ acquired an additional connotation of sexual licentiousness. When the English called King Charles II the ‘merry monarch,’ they did not mean that he was unusually good-natured.
Indeed, the sovereign, who reigned from 1660-1685, was notorious for enjoying the company of multiple mistresses. His trysts produced more than a few out-of-wedlock offspring.
Anyway, while Victorian Brits declared holy war on “Merry Christmas!” the salutation survived in the old colonies. (Frum also pointed out that prudish Victorian Americans — the self-appointed arbiters of public morality, much like Trump’s white, conservative evangelical Christian base — tried to get everybody stateside to say “Happy Christmas!”)
Frum noted that Victorians on this side of the pond weren’t entirely unsuccessful. The original version of Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” — AKA “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” — ends “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”
Trump’s a teetotaler. But thrice wed, he supposedly cheated on wives one and two, as well as the First Lady. Trump’s lawyer purportedly paid porn star Stephanie Clifford more than $130,000 to clam up her about alleged assignations with his client.
Frum’s tweet collected its share of replies. One respondent posted a screenshot of a Dec. 23 Trump tweet “wishing everyone a very Happy Holiday season!”
“Ahhhhh!!!,” Linda Allen posted. “The war on Christmas is back and its [sic] coming from inside the White House. Ahhhhh!”
User “joe ro” concluded,
Hence, the liberal move to stop saying Merry Christmas, and replace it with Happy Holidays, is about saving Christmas from the moral degradation that Trump wants to maintain.