We Wish You a Merry Christmas

We Wish You a Merry Christmas is a popular English Christmas carol from the West Country of England. In 1935, Oxford University Press published a four-part choral arrangement by Arthur Warrell under the title A Merry Christmas, describing the piece as a West Country Traditional Song.[1][2] Warrells arrangement is notable for using I instead of we in the lyrics; 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.[3] The earlier history of the carol is unclear. It is absent from the collections of West-countrymen Davies Gilbert (1822 and 1823)[4] and William Sandys (1833),[5] as well as from the great anthologies of Sylvester (1861)[6] and Husk (1864).[7] It is also missing from 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.[8]