How One Comma Almost Ruined Christmas

It’s mid-December, and by now many of us have either become inured to the barrage of Christmas music wafting out of overhead speakers in stores, on the radio, or from our mother’s Spotify account, or we have embraced it fully. Many a retail worker has been regaled with a random outbreak of song by at least one customer belting out an off-key accompaniment to some festive holiday track. And this is by no means a bad thing. It is pure respite from the misery inflicted upon them by the far more common Grinchiness of most checkout transactions.

Sing on! A retail worker’s sanity depends on it.

But I am not here to talk about Christmas carols in general, or their effect on the psyches of largely unsung heroes of the season. I am here to talk about one carol in particular and how the erroneous placement of a comma has come to alter the originally intended meaning of the lyrics.

As we gather in choirs, shops, and grocery-store aisles and cheerfully sing:

God rest you, merry gentlemen…

Which sounds like a benevolent deity suggesting that a group of cheerful men settle down with a nice cup of tea, perhaps followed by a nap, we may find it comforting—but is it correct? Not even a little.

Modern ears think the troublesome comma belongs after the word you. In fact, it doesn’t. The correct placement is after the word merry.

To understand what happened, we must travel back in time to when English was… well, doing its own thing.

“God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” dates back to at least the early 16th century, with the earliest known printed version appearing in 1760, though it was clearly circulating orally long before that. This places it squarely in the Early Modern English period—the linguistic wild west between Shakespeare and what we’d recognize as modern speech.

Back then, rest meant to keep or to cause to remain. Merry meant joyful, and gentlemen—as it still is today—was simply the form of address. In other words: May God keep you joyful, gentlemen. No naps. No resting. No divine bedtime routine. Just a blessing for continued joy.

Sentence structure was looser. Word meanings hadn’t settled down yet. And punctuation? Often it was optional. Sometimes it was aspirational. Mostly, it was vibes-based.

The carol wasn’t written with commas the way we use them now; those were added later by editors and printers trying their best to tame a language that still didn’t know what it wanted to be when it grew up.

The reason we get it wrong today is that modern English almost never places adjectives after pronouns the way “you merry” does. So our brains instinctively reattach “merry” to “gentlemen,” because that’s how English works now. We’re not careless—we’re just translating unconsciously.

Unfortunately, English does not reward that kind of optimism.

The Takeaway (Other Than Eternal Comma Vigilance):

This is one of those lovely moments where language reminds us that it has a history—and that history still echoes in the things we sing without thinking.

It’s also a seasonal reminder that punctuation matters more than we like to admit.

So this year, sing it proudly (and correctly) knowing that no gentlemen are being instructed to lie down on the job.

God rest you merry, One and All.