It's the most wonderful time of the year! Get in the Christmas spirit with these festive and fun holiday wallpapers!
Celebrate the joy and warmth of the season with pretty Christmas wallpapers that will warm your heart and bring a smile to your face. Let this holiday season be full of magic - sharing moments with family and friends, decorating the Christmas tree, making homemade ornaments, singing carols, putting cookies out for Santa, and more! We may pray for sunshine all year long, but the moment the holiday season is here, everyone wishes for a white Christmas. There’s simply nothing better than sitting by the fire with loved ones, enjoying a mug of hot chocolate and a candy cane, red and green wrapped presents under the tree, snowflakes falling gently outside…
Find joy and happiness in this holy night! You can even spread the Christmas spirit by sharing these festive wallpapers with friends!
The greetings and farewells "merry Christmas" and "happy Christmas" are traditionally used in English-speaking countries, starting a few weeks before December 25 each year.
Variations are:
"Merry Christmas", the traditional English greeting, composed of merry (jolly, happy) and Christmas (Old English: Cristes mæsse, for Christ's Mass).
"Happy Christmas", an equivalent greeting often used in Great Britain and Ireland.
"Merry Xmas", with the "X" replacing "Christ" (see Xmas) is sometimes used in writing, but very rarely in speech. This is in line with the traditional use of the Greek letter chi (uppercase Χ, lowercase χ), the initial letter of the word Χριστός (Christ), to refer to Christ.
These greetings and their equivalents in other languages are popular not only in countries with large Christian populations, but also in the largely non-Christian nations of China and Japan, where Christmas is celebrated primarily due to cultural influences of predominantly Christian countries. They have somewhat decreased in popularity in the United States and Canada in recent decades, but polls in 2005 indicated that they remained more popular than "happy holidays" or other alternatives.
The alternative "happy Christmas" gained usage in the late 19th century, and in the UK and Ireland is a common spoken greeting, along with "merry Christmas." One reason may be the Victorian middle-class influence in attempting to separate wholesome celebration of the Christmas season from public insobriety and associated asocial behaviour, at a time when merry also meant "intoxicated" – Queen Elizabeth II is said to prefer "happy Christmas" for this reason. In her annual Christmas messages to the Commonwealth, Queen Elizabeth has used "happy Christmas" far more often than "merry Christmas." Note: "merry Christmas" has been used only four times: in 1962, 1967, 1970 and 1999. "Happy Christmas" has been used on almost every broadcast since 1956. One year included both greetings, and "blessed Christmas" was used in 1954 and 2007.
In the American poet Clement Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (1823), the final line, originally written as "Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night", has been changed in many later editions to "Merry Christmas to all," perhaps indicating the relative popularity of the phrases in the US.
