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."
Worse - per Oxford English Dictionary - in the 17th & 18th c. "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.
American English preserved antique forms that perished out of British English (eg "fall" rather than "autumn") so "Merry Christmas" survived here. But respectable Victorian Americans worked hard if unsuccessfully to sell the more genteel "happy Christmas," eg ...
in the last lines of Twas the Night Before Christmas, usually quoted as "Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!" But Clement Clarke Moore (son of an Episcopal bishop, professor of Greek and Hebrew, and heir to the estate that is now Manhattan's Chelsea) actually wrote:
And now to open the Christmas booze for family and friends!
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