Pharmaceutical Review (Staff Reporter); Executives of Pakistan Pharmacis Federation (www.pharmafed.com) share the spirit of peace and joy on this occasion of Merry Christmas with your acquaintances and loved ones.
The greetings and farewells “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Christmas” are traditionally used in English-speaking countries, starting a few weeks before Christmas (25 December) 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 that is more common 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 Christmas season, holiday season (in U.S. and Canada), the festive season, or simply the holidays, is an annually-recurring period recognized in many Christians and Christianity-influenced countries that is generally considered to run from late November to early January. It incorporates a period of shopping which comprises a peak season for the retail sector. Originally, the term “Christmas season” was considered synonymous withChristmastide, a term itself derived from Yuletide, which runs from December 25 (Christmas Day) to January 6 (Epiphany), popularly known as the 12 Days of Christmas. However, as the economic impact involving the anticipatory lead-up to Christmas Day grew in America and Western Europe into the 19th and 20th centuries, the term “Christmas season” began to become synonymous instead with the traditional Christian Advent season, the period observed in Western Christianity from the fourth Sunday before Christmas Day until Christmas Day itself. The term “Advent calendar” survives in the secular Western parlance as a term referring to a countdown to Christmas Day from the beginning of December. Beginning in the mid-20th century, as the Christian-associated Christmas holiday became increasingly secularized and central to American economics and culture while religious-multicultural sensitivity rose, generic references to the season that omitted the word “Christmas” became more common in the corporate and the public sphere of the United States, which has caused a semantics controversy that continues to the present. By the late 20th century, the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah and the African American cultural holiday of Kwanzaa began to be considered in the U.S. as being part of the “holiday season”, a term that as of 2013 has become equally or more prevalent than “Christmas season” in U.S. Sources to refer to the end-of-the-year festive period. “Holiday season” has also spread in varying degrees in Canada and Australasia, however in the United Kingdom, the phrase “holiday season” is not widely understood to be synonymous with the Christmas–New Year period, and is often instead associated with summer holidays.
“Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men of good will,”.