formality - How many articles should go in "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!"?


On the very first Christmas card it was written as "A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year..." http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/christmas-card-sayings-and-phrases.html


In Wiktionary that same general phrase is "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year" http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Merry_Christmas_and_a_Happy_New_Year


A few quick searches in Google show that many people use it without any articles at all:



Merry Christmas and Happy New Year



Does anyone have a source explaining if one of those phrases is more correct than others and if there's any difference implied by the number of articles used?


Edit just to make it more clear: I'm asking for the case when you design a Christmas card, for example, and you have to write the phrase on the card — not personally to anybody, but rather as an impersonally commercial message to the general audience.



Answer



There's a difference between a complete, grammatically-correct sentence and a greeting.


If I was writing a complete sentence, I would write "I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year." But if I was just greeting someone, I'd say, "Merry Christmas!", not "A Merry Christmas".


It's like when you write a title or a headline, you often leave out words, especially articles and versions of the verb "to be". A newspaper headline will say something like "Stock Market Up", not "The Stock Market is Up".


I suspect people write "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year", i.e. no article on the first but including an article on the second, because they're starting out writing a headline type of construction but when they get to the middle it's getting kind of long and they put in the article as if it was a complete sentence through force of habit. I think it's inconsistent and I wouldn't do it. I'd generally write "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!", or maybe possibly "A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year."


Of course, in these politically-correct times, the correct greeting is "Happy Unspecified Holiday to you, unless the very idea of holidays offends you, in which case please pretend I said nothing and walked past you in silence".


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