The Roll Up: December 23, 2025 

TL;DR: As much as it seems against the spirit of the season, people can get all up in arms over how you greet them this December. It often comes down to those on the conservative side preferring "Merry Christmas," while those on the left like the more inclusive "Happy Holidays." Rolli IQ looked at what's trending more on social media. Here's what we know:

How one greets another person during the end of the year holidays seems like the last thing to fight about, but the political divide means choosing the right greeting can to be a struggle.

Rolli IQ analysis shows "Merry Christmas" with a strong hold as the top holiday sentiment being expressed over the past week. Nearly ten thousand mentions of the phrase "Merry Christmas" appeared across Twitter/X, YouTube, Reddit and Bluesky, yielding nearly 2.5 million engagements. Rolli IQ rates the posts mostly irrelevant because people weren't commenting on the words "Merry Christmas," but rather expressing them as a wish for others.

The more religiously-neutral greeting "Happy Holidays" was a fairly distant second among users on those social media platforms, with Rolli IQ showing about half of the number of mentions and slightly more than half as many instances of engagement.

Another religiously-neutral message, "Season's Greetings" actually had the most total mentions of the three greetings, but garnered very few engagements--perhaps coming off as just a bit too bland for most to want to share.

For the Anglophiles out there, the common British take on the season, "Happy Christmas," wasn't terribly common in terms of mentions, but did get a decent level of engagement. 

Rolli IQ also examined those greetings tied to a specific faith or ethnic community and found that a fairly high level of use and engagement for the greeting from the Jewish faith, "Happy Hanukkah" or "Happy Chanukah," with levels far exceeding engagement for "Season's Greetings." The African American festival of Kwanzaa garnered a low level of mentions and engagement, which runs curiously counter to the higher level of use of Twitter/X by members of the African American community. 

Interestingly, a Rolli IQ Topic Tree analysis shows those using "Merry Christmas" were, as one would expect, using it to express religious wishes for the season, but also included it in outreach across faiths.

But a Rolli IQ Topic Tree analysis also shows those sticking with "Happy Holidays" used the greeting to reach across cultures and generally did not include religious messages in those posts using this more secular greeting. 

The bottom line is that the analysis using Rolli IQ to look at online posts containing the most common holiday greetings tells us that this is the time of year to enjoy family, friends and the best things in the world and not to argue over how we express those feelings! Greetings for the season to you and yours from the team at Rolli!