Merry Christmas — or Should We Say Happy Holidays — from Rolli!

Every December, American social media generates a predictable ritual: the 'War on Christmas' cycle, in which partisans on both sides use holiday greeting choices as proxies for broader cultural disputes. Rolli IQ's holiday analysis, published in December 2025, set out to look at what the data actually showed — separating the culture war narrative from the underlying behavioral reality of how people were actually greeting each other online.

Across Twitter/X, YouTube, Reddit, and Bluesky, 'Merry Christmas' dominated both volume and engagement, generating approximately 10,000 mentions and 2.5 million engagements. 'Happy Holidays' received roughly half that volume at around 5,000 mentions and 1.25 million engagements. 'Season's Greetings' showed a counterintuitive pattern: high mentions but minimal engagement, suggesting it functions as a safe-harbor phrase that people use but don't actually engage with. British-inflected 'Happy Christmas' and 'Happy Hanukkah' showed moderate activity. 'Happy Kwanzaa' registered low mentions despite demographic data suggesting higher African American social media usage rates — a finding the analysis attributed to platform composition rather than lack of observance.

The more analytically interesting finding was what drove the choice between 'Merry Christmas' and 'Happy Holidays.' Rolli IQ's analysis found that users weren't primarily choosing phrases based on political identity, as the culture war framing would predict. They were choosing based on context: 'Merry Christmas' was more prevalent in posts addressed to specific communities — family, church groups, neighborhood networks — while 'Happy Holidays' appeared more frequently in posts addressed to general or unknown audiences, suggesting its use is driven by a genuine desire for inclusivity in mixed-audience contexts rather than political signaling. Users expressing explicitly political views were a minority of those using either phrase.

“Rolli IQ tracked holiday greeting usage across platforms. 'Merry Christmas' dominated with nearly 10,000 mentions and 2.…”

Perhaps the most resonant data point in the analysis was a user quote that emerged from organic sampling: '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.' It appeared in several variants across platforms and captured what the data suggested was the majority position — an indifference to the greeting-phrase debate that the media coverage of the 'War on Christmas' chronically overstates. From Rolli, with whatever greeting fits your community best: the signal we tracked was mostly good.