How to say “Merry Christmas” around the world?

Christmas is celebrated all over the world. As such, there are hundreds of ways to express Christmas greetings in many different languages. Some of them are famous, while others are almost entirely unknown to Italian speakers!

If you’d like to know how to say Merry Christmas in a different language (or two), keep scrolling!

How to say Merry Christmas in different European languages

Our Italian readers are most likely to have seen or heard European Christmas greetings over the years. What we sometimes don’t think about, however, is that certain European languages are a passe-partout for wishing people all over the world a Merry Christmas.

• Merry Christmas: this is by far the best-known foreign Christmas greeting in Italy. What might surprise you, however, is that this English-language greeting can be used all the way from Sweden to Australia, due to its widespread diffusion;
• Feliz Navidad: you can use this expression to wish a Merry Christmas to your friends in Spanish-speaking countries, including Central and South America, and the small territory of Gibraltar;
• Boas Festas! this literally means “Happy Holidays” and is an inclusive way of spreading festive cheer in Portuguese (it also works perfectly well in Brazil, where people also say Feliz Natal!);
• Joyeux Noël: you can use this expression to wish a Merry Christmas to French speakers all over the world, including people in Canada, Belgium, Luxembourg, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, and many more.

How to wish people a Merry Christmas in languages from further afield

We’ve learnt how to wish people a Merry Christmas in the most popular European languages, but what about languages from other, more distant parts of the world?

• Merii Kurisumasu! This strangely familiar expression is how Christmas greetings are given in Japan. The phrase is none other than a Japanese adaptation of the English “Merry Christmas”;
• Natal Mubarak: you can use this greeting to wish a Merry Christmas to your pals in India;
• Milad Mubarak: this expression is very similar to the Indian one and can be used to give festive greetings to people in Morocco, Oman, Qatar, and many other Middle Eastern countries. It is, in fact, a generic way of offering Christmas greetings in Arabic;
• La Maunia Le Kilisimasi Ma Le Tausaga Fou: this expression (which is somewhat of a tongue twister) is used to wish people a Merry Christmas to people in the Samoan Islands;
• Kung His Hsin Nien bing Chu Shen Tan: Taiwanese Christmas greetings are also quite challenging to pronounce for non-native speakers.

This is just an overview of how to wish people a Merry Christmas in some of the most widely spoken languages around the world, but sometimes a quick festive greeting isn’t enough. If you need to translate a longer festive letter, for example, try our language translation services. And if you’re in a hurry? You can take advantage of EuroTrad’s 24-hour translation service!