Merry Christmas vs. Happy Holidays: Which Is More Popular Now?

Merry Christmas Vs. Happy Holidays: Which Is More Popular Now?

Merry Christmas still dominates modern vernacular.

Despite pushes throughout the past two decades to move towards a more universal "Happy Holidays," Google Book's Ngram Viewer clearly shows that the Christmas-themed phrase has remained the most popular phrase of all by a good margin, even in recent years. While the data only goes up to 2008, it still shows a 17-to-1 comparison between the two phrases, according to the Wall Street Journal.

More recent online data, using Google's Insights, shows that Merry Christmas has also remained popular during the holiday season through the past few years, dwarfing other popular holiday sayings in searches by a sizable margin.

While "Happy Holidays" has seen a 200 percent increase in usage in the past two decades, proportionally larger than that of "Merry Christmas," it's still minuscule in comparison. Merry Christmas' search history shows the same trend.

Critics of Ngram may say that the data doesn't truly reflect a word's usage, as it only looks to books, however the service provides at least the beginnings of a rare look into raw data like this, says the WSJ.

Take a look below to see the data for yourself, as well as a look at other popular holiday terms.

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