"We Wish You a Merry Christmas" is a traditional English Christmas carol, listed as numbers 230 and 9681 in the Roud Folk Song Index. The famous version of the carol is from the English West Country, but the song had previously been performed by carolers, wassailers and mummers in the nineteenth century, with a variety of tunes and lyrics

The Bristol-based composer, conductor and organist Arthur Warrell (1883-1939)[1] is responsible for the popularity of the carol. Warrell, a lecturer at the University of Bristol from 1909, arranged the tune for his own University of Bristol Madrigal Singers as an elaborate four-part arrangement, which he performed with them in concert on December 6, 1935[3] and had published by Oxford University Press under the title "A Merry Christmas: West Country traditional song" the same year

Warrell's arrangement is notable for using "I" instead of "we" in the words; the first line is "I wish you a Merry Christmas". It was subsequently republished in the collection Carols for Choirs (1961), and remains widely performed.

The popular version begins as follows:

We wish you a merry Christmas

We wish you a merry Christmas

We wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year

Good tidings we bring to you and your kin

We wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year

The greeting "a merry Christmas and a happy New Year" is recorded from the early eighteenth century, however the history of the carol itself is unclear. Its origin probably lies in the English tradition wherein wealthy people of the community gave Christmas treats to the carolers on Christmas Eve, such as "figgy pudding" that was very much like modern-day Christmas puddings;[7][8][9] in the West Country of England, "figgy pudding" referred to a raisin or plum pudding, not necessarily one containing figs. In the famous version of the song, the singer demands figgy pudding from the audience, threatening to not "go until we get some".

The song is absent from the collections of West-countrymen Davies Gilbert (1822 and 1823 and William Sandys (1833), as well as from the great anthologies of Sylvester (1861 ] and Husk (1864), and The Oxford Book of Carols (1928). In the comprehensive New Oxford Book of Carols (1992), editors Hugh Keyte and Andrew Parrott describe it as "English traditional" and "[t]he remnant of an envoie much used by wassailers and other luck visitors"; no source or date is given. The famous version of the song was completely unknown outside the West Country before Arthur Warrell popularised it