Merry Christmas in Portuguese: Feliz Natal

Merry Christmas in Portuguese is Feliz Natal!, and it is the same two words in Brazil, Portugal and every other Portuguese-speaking country. Feliz is "happy" and Natal is "Christmas", from the Latin for "birth". What changes across the Atlantic is the sound, the way a wish is put together, and almost everything around the greeting: Brazil’s Father Christmas is Papai Noel, Portugal’s is Pai Natal; Portugal eats salt cod on Christmas Eve, and in Brazil Christmas falls in summer. Below are Christmas wishes in Portuguese ready to copy, with the Brazilian and European forms side by side wherever they differ, then the greeting word by word, the words of the season in both countries, the carols, and how often each country’s films and television say them.

Updated 28 October 2026 · 15 min read

Christmas wishes in Portuguese, ready to copy

The difference that matters most in a card is the word for "you". In Brazil the everyday "you" is você; in Portugal it is tu for family and friends, and você to someone’s face can sound distant. Both countries say vocês to several people, and o senhor or a senhora to someone they address formally. The comparison, with counts, is in Brazilian vs European Portuguese.

The second difference is where a small pronoun like te, "you", goes. Brazilians put it before the verb, te desejo, and Portugal after it, joined by a hyphen, desejo-te. Both mean "I wish you".

For family

Convosco is Portugal’s "with you all"; Brazil says com vocês. A woman writing the last line says obrigada.

For friends

Que followed by the subjunctive is how Portuguese makes a wish: que … seja is "may it be". A gente, "people", is Brazil’s everyday "we", with a he-or-she verb.

For colleagues and clients

Formal writing is where the two countries meet. Everyday Brazilian Portuguese often starts a sentence with a pronoun, as in the card line Te amo, but formal Brazilian Portuguese, like the European kind, avoids it, so a company in either country writes Desejamos-lhe, never Lhe desejamos.

Religious wishes

Feliz Natal, word by word

• Feliz is "happy", a learned borrowing from Latin felix (fēlīcem), according to Wiktionary. It is the same word as in feliz aniversário, "happy birthday", and Feliz Ano Novo.
• Natal is from Latin natalis, "of birth", says the Priberam dictionary; Wiktionary traces the festival’s name to natalis dies Domini, "the birthday of the Lord". Besides the festival and its season, Priberam gives it four more senses: as an adjective, "of birth" and "native", as in terra natal, "homeland"; as a noun, a birthday and the anniversary of a birth.

So Feliz Natal is, word for word, "happy birthday", the birthday being Christ’s. Two places are named after the day: Wiktionary records that the Natal region of South Africa takes its name from Vasco da Gama reaching it on Christmas Day 1497, and that the Brazilian city of Natal, capital of Rio Grande do Norte, was founded on 25 December 1599.

Saying it in Brazil and in Portugal

Three sounds make the difference:

• The final l. In most of Brazil an l at the end of a syllable turns into a w sound, so Natal rhymes with English "cow". In Portugal it stays an l, a dark one, made with the back of the tongue raised, as in English "full".
• The final z. Most of Brazil ends feliz with an s sound. In Portugal, and in Rio de Janeiro and the north-east of Brazil, an s or z at the end of a syllable is said "sh".
• The unstressed vowels. Portugal reduces them: the e of feliz is a very short, barely voiced vowel, which can drop out altogether, and the first a of Natal is a short "uh". Brazil says both more fully.

A capital N

Natal takes a capital letter when it is the festival. The 1990 Orthographic Agreement lists it by name: festivals are written with a capital, Natal, Páscoa, Ramadão, Todos os Santos, while days, months and seasons are not (dezembro, verão). Priberam, too, notes that the festival is usually written with a capital, so a capital also tells o Natal, Christmas, from natal, "native". Feliz takes a capital only at the start of a sentence: Desejo-te um feliz Natal.

Other ways to say Merry Christmas in Portuguese

Boas Festas is in the dictionary as a greeting. Priberam lists boas-festas, written with a hyphen as a noun, as "a greeting made at Christmas and New Year", with the examples cartão de boas-festas, "a Christmas card", and escreveu a dar as boas-festas, "wrote to send the season’s greetings". The same dictionary writes Natal and Ano Novo with capitals in that definition.

The words of the Christmas season, in Brazil and in Portugal

Papai Noel or Pai Natal

Both are Father Christmas, and both are built on the word for "father", pai. Brazil’s Papai Noel uses papai, "dad", which Priberam calls the affectionate, informal word for a father; the dictionary labels papai-noel as Brazilian. Portugal’s Pai Natal is "Father Christmas" word for word, and Wiktionary lists a Mãe Natal, Mrs Claus, beside him. The everyday papai and Portugal’s papá are counted on family members in Portuguese.

The consoada and the bacalhau

In Portugal the supper on the night of 24 December is called the consoada, from Latin consolata, "consoled". Priberam’s first sense is the light meal Catholics took at night on a fasting day, and its second the festive dinner on Christmas Eve. Portuguese Wikipedia describes it as mainly bacalhau, salt cod, boiled or baked, followed by sweets such as aletria (sweet vermicelli), rabanadas and filhós (fritters). The north often adds octopus, and in Trás-os-Montes there is turkey and roast lamb, pork or kid. At the end of the night the faithful went to the Missa do Galo, "the rooster’s Mass", which Priberam defines simply as the Mass celebrated on Christmas night.

Brazil kept some of that table. The same Wikipedia article says that Brazilian Christmas dinners now set roast pork leg and chicken close beside the peru, the turkey, and took several recipes over from Portugal, among them rabanadas and bolinhos de bacalhau, salt-cod fritters. A rabanada is, in Priberam’s words, a slice of dry bread soaked in milk, dipped in egg and fried, served with sugar and cinnamon or syrup.

Bolo-rei and panetone

Portugal’s Christmas cake is the bolo-rei, "king cake": a ring of soft dough, raisins, nuts and crystallised fruit that Priberam calls "typical of the Christmas season". English Wikipedia says it is eaten from the beginning of December until Epiphany, that its recipe comes from the southern French gâteau des rois by way of the Confeitaria Nacional in Lisbon, and that it hides a dried fava bean: whoever finds it pays for next year’s cake.

Brazil’s is the panetone, the Italian panettone. Portuguese Wikipedia says it came with the Italian immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that the first brand to make and sell it in Brazil was Bauducco, founded by the Italian-Brazilian Carlo Bauducco, which began making it in the mid-1950s and added other kinds, among them a chocolate one under its own trademark, Chocottone.

Natalino or natalício

Portuguese has two adjectives for "to do with Christmas", and Priberam gives them as synonyms: enfeites natalinos, "Christmas decorations", and a quadra natalícia, "the Christmas season". The dictionary marks neither as regional, but the subtitles split them cleanly: in Brazilian dialogue natalino is 96 per cent of the two, and in Portugal’s only 10 per cent. Natalício also means "birthday", in aniversário natalício.

Amigo secreto or amigo oculto

The Christmas gift draw is the amigo secreto, "secret friend", in both countries. Priberam labels the other name, amigo oculto, "hidden friend", as Brazilian; English Wikipedia says it is used in parts of Brazil, and also lists it, with amigo invisível, among the names in Portugal and Spain. The sources disagree about Portugal, so take amigo secreto as the name everyone understands.

Dia de Reis and the janeiras

The season ends on 6 January, the Dia de Reis, the day of the three kings, which Priberam gives as another name for the Epiphany. Before it, in Portugal, come the janeiras: Priberam defines them as "New Year songs" and as presents given on the first day of the year. Portuguese Wikipedia describes groups going through the streets singing them from 1 to 6 January and being given chestnuts, walnuts, apples or sausage, nowadays more often chocolate and money; the article cites no sources, so treat the details as a description rather than a record.

Christmas in summer

In Brazil, Christmas falls in summer. In the southern hemisphere summer runs from the December solstice to the March equinox, and Wikipedia names Brazil among the southern countries where summer goes with the Christmas and New Year holidays. A Brazilian Papai Noel in a fur-trimmed suit is working in the heat; the Portuguese Pai Natal is working in winter.

The carols: Noite Feliz

The Portuguese Silent Night is Noite Feliz, and its title means "happy night", not "silent night" like the German Stille Nacht. Portuguese Wikipedia credits the version sung in the Portuguese-speaking countries to Frei Pedro Sinzig, a German Franciscan who became a Brazilian citizen, and dates it to about 1912. Sinzig died in 1952, so under both Brazilian and European law his words left copyright at the end of 2022, and it opens:

The same article records a second, anonymous version, Noite de paz, "night of peace". The German original, which is in the public domain, is on Merry Christmas in German.

Jingle Bells has Brazilian words too, by the songwriter Evaldo Rui, which Portuguese Wikipedia calls Sino de Belém, "the bell of Bethlehem": they are about the birth of Jesus rather than a sleigh ride, and João Dias recorded them for Odeon in 1941. We have not found the text in a source we trust, so it is not printed here.

How often do Portuguese films say them?

We counted the words of the season in two sets of film and television subtitles: about 426 million words of Brazilian Portuguese and 217 million words of European Portuguese.

Each figure is how many times the word is said per million words. These are single words, so every count includes whatever else the word means, which is what the last column is for. Papai Noel and Pai Natal are two words each and cannot be counted as phrases; Noel, which only the Brazilian name contains, stands in for them.

What the counts show:

• Portugal says Natal more. 138.6 times per million words against 118.1 in Brazil, the same figures as on the nine-language page, even though Brazil’s count also includes the city of Natal.
• Noel is far commoner in Brazil. It is said 6.8 times as often in Brazilian subtitles as in Portugal’s. Written with a hyphen, pai-natal turns up 27 times in Portugal and never in Brazil.
• The consoada belongs to Portugal. It is said 43 times as often there, and only four times in all of Brazil’s subtitles. Ceia, the supper, is said equally often in both.
• Bolo-rei barely reaches the screen. It turns up eight times in Portugal’s subtitles and never in Brazil’s; panetone, in either spelling, 80 times in Brazil.
• Bacalhau is said about as often in both countries, at 1.8 and 1.6 per million, so the count cannot pick out the Christmas Eve cod from salt cod at any other time of year.

Two cautions. Peru is the country as well as the turkey, so it cannot tell you who eats more turkey. And most of these subtitles are translations of English-language films and series, so what they show is what each country’s translators chose for American Christmas films, which is one reason bolo-rei hardly appears.

Learn the language behind the greeting

Feliz Natal is two words, and the rest of the sentence is where Brazil and Portugal part. Verbavia teaches Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese with a recording of each word, from the most common words up, a lesson a day, free on the web.

The everyday greetings, from oi to tchau, are in greetings in Portuguese, and the red and green of the season in colours in Portuguese; December itself is in the months of the year in Portuguese. The same Christmas greeting in eight other languages is in Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in 9 languages, and the card wishes of other languages are in Merry Christmas in Spanish, in French, in Italian and in German.

Merry Christmas has its own page in Chinese too.

Sources

• Priberam, Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa: natal (from Latin natalis; the senses; the capital for the festival), boas-festas (a greeting at Christmas and New Year; cartão de boas-festas), papai-noel (labelled Brazilian; papai, the affectionate word for a father), pai natal, consoada (from Latin consolata; the fasting meal; the Christmas Eve dinner), missa (missa do galo), ceia, rabanada, bolo-rei, presépio, árvore (árvore de Natal), natalino, natalício, amigo-oculto (labelled Brazilian), amigo-secreto, epifania (= Dia de Reis), janeiras and réveillon.
• Wiktionary: Natal (pronunciation in Brazil and Portugal; natalis dies Domini; the province of Natal, 1497, and the city of Natal, 25 December 1599; Mãe Natal) and feliz (pronunciation in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro and Portugal; from Latin fēlīcem).
• The 1990 Orthographic Agreement, Base XIX, on Wikisource): capitals for festivals (Natal, Páscoa), lower case for days, months and seasons.
• Wikipedia: Portuguese phonology (the velarised l of European Portuguese, citing Emiliano 2009; the l vocalised to w in Brazil, citing Barbosa & Albano 2004; the coda sibilant in Portugal, Rio and the north-east; vowel reduction), Brazilian Portuguese (pronoun placement; formal Brazilian Portuguese avoids a sentence-initial pronoun), Bolo-rei (the gâteau des rois, the Confeitaria Nacional, the fava), Secret Santa (amigo secreto, amigo oculto, amigo invisível), Summer (the southern summer; Brazil’s Christmas holidays), and in Portuguese, Ceia de Natal (the consoada and its dishes; the Brazilian Christmas dinner), Panetone (Italian immigrants; Bauducco; Chocottone), Janeiras, Noite Feliz (Pedro Sinzig, about 1912; the anonymous Noite de paz), Frei Pedro Sinzig (1876–1952), Jingle Bells (Evaldo Rui’s Sino de Belém; the 1941 recording) and Evaldo Rui.
• Barbosa, P. A. & Albano, E. C. (2004). Brazilian Portuguese. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 34 (2): 227–232.
• Lei n.º 9.610, de 19 de fevereiro de 1998, article 41 (Brazil: seventy years after the author’s death, counted from the following 1 January). planalto.gov.br; Directive 2006/116/EC, articles 1 and 8 (the same term in the European Union). eur-lex.europa.eu
• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, the Brazilian (pt_br) and European (pt) lists, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The counts are computed by scripts/frequency_natal.py in Verbavia’s repository and printed from its output rather than typed.