Merry Christmas in Spanish: wishes for every card

Merry Christmas in Spanish is ¡Feliz Navidad!, said "feh-LEES nah-vee-DAHD", and it is understood in every Spanish-speaking country. Feliz means "happy" and Navidad means "Christmas", from the Latin for "birth". Below are Christmas wishes in Spanish ready to copy into a card, for family, friends and work; then what the greeting means, the other ways people say it, how to write it with the right capital letters, the words of the season from Nochebuena to Reyes, and how often Spanish film and television subtitles say them.

Updated 28 October 2026 · 13 min read

Christmas wishes in Spanish, ready to copy

Spanish has two ways of saying "you" to one person: tú for family and friends, usted for someone you would address formally. Pick the wish that matches the person; the verb changes with the choice.

For family

The last two differ because Spanish has two plural "you"s: vosotros (object form os), used for family and friends in most of Spain, and ustedes (object form los), which is the only plural "you" in Latin America, the Canary Islands and western Andalusia.

For friends

For work, with usted

Le deseo is "I wish you" to one person you call usted; les deseamos is "we wish you" to several. With tú the same wish is te deseo. More on choosing between them is in formal and informal you.

Religious wishes

Signing off

• Un fuerte abrazo: "a big hug".
• Un abrazo: "a hug".
• Con cariño: "with love", for family.
• Besos: "kisses", for family and close friends.

Feliz Navidad, word by word

• Feliz is "happy", from Latin felix. It is the same word as in feliz cumpleaños, "happy birthday", and its plural is felices.
• Navidad comes from late Latin nativitas, "birth", the birth of Jesus. The Real Academia Española’s dictionary gives it three Christmas meanings: the festival, the day itself (25 December), and the whole season from Christmas Eve to the Epiphany on 6 January.

Feliz Navidad is therefore "happy Nativity".

Saying it: feh-LEES nah-vee-DAHD, with the stress on -LEES and -DAHD. Three details:

• The v of Navidad is not the English v: it is a soft b, made with the lips nearly closed (IPA [β]).
• The final d is very light, close to the th of "this" (IPA [ð]), and is often hardly heard at all.
• In most of Spain the z of feliz is said like the th of "thin": "feh-LEETH". Throughout Latin America, in the Canary Islands and in part of Andalusia it is an s, and the Real Academia Española counts both as fully correct.

Other ways to say Merry Christmas in Spanish

Two notes on the table:

• Felices Navidades is correct. The dictionary records the plural navidades "with the same meaning as the singular" for the season. It does not mark either form as belonging to one country.
• Felices Pascuas can mean Easter. Pascua is also Passover and Easter, and is used for Christmas too: the dictionary lists the Nativity as one of the pascuas, and Pascuas in the plural as the Christmas season up to Epiphany. At the end of December nobody will misunderstand it.

Que pases una feliz Navidad: the verb changes with the person

Que followed by the subjunctive is how Spanish makes a wish: que pases is "may you spend". The verb is pasar, "to spend (time)", and it changes with whoever you are writing to:

The same works with other verbs: que tengas unas felices fiestas ("have a happy holiday"), que disfrutes ("enjoy it").

Capital letters

Spanish uses fewer capital letters than English. The Fundéu, the style foundation advised by the Real Academia Española, sums up the academic rules:

• Navidad takes a capital when it names the festival or the day, 25 December.
• navidades, meaning the season, is better in lower case: pasaré las navidades en casa. A capital is possible but not recommended.
• Nochebuena, Nochevieja, Año Nuevo and Reyes are names of festivities and take a capital. One word is preferred: Nochebuena and Nochevieja rather than Noche Buena and Noche Vieja.
• año nuevo is lower case when it means the whole coming year rather than 1 January: os deseo un próspero año nuevo. That is why the wishes above write próspero año nuevo in lower case.
• feliz, próspero, paz, amor are ordinary words and are lower case, however often you see Feliz Navidad in the middle of a sentence. At the start of a card the first word takes a capital as usual: ¡Feliz Navidad!
• belén, nacimiento, pesebre (the nativity scene) are lower case. Belén with a capital is the town, Bethlehem.

Spanish also opens an exclamation with an upside-down mark: ¡Feliz Navidad!, never Feliz Navidad!

The words of the Christmas season

The Three Kings each have a name: Melchor, Gaspar and Baltasar. In Spain, Spanish-speaking America and the Philippines, 28 December is a day for pranks, and the person caught out is an inocente.

Spain and Latin America

Spanish-speaking countries share the greeting and the calendar, and differ in some of the words and customs.

The sources do not draw the lines sharply. Wiktionary lists Chile and Venezuela under both nacimiento and pesebre, and the Spanish dictionary marks none of the three words as regional; Papá Noel and Santa Claus are both understood everywhere. And the brief summary "Nochevieja in Spain, Año Viejo in Latin America" does not hold up either: Nochevieja is in the dictionary with no regional mark, and Mexico calls the night Nochevieja or Fin de Año.

How often do Spanish films say them?

We counted the words of the season in Spanish film and television subtitles, about 423 million words of dialogue.

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: Reyes is mostly kings and people called Reyes, and only sometimes the Three Kings.

Four things the counts do show:

• The singular is the one people say. Navidad is said 18.1 times for every Navidades. Felices Navidades is correct, but on screen Feliz Navidad and la Navidad are what you will hear.
• Christmas Eve is talked about more than New Year’s Eve. Nochebuena is said 2.9 times as often as Nochevieja, and Navidad 23.0 times as often as Nochebuena.
• Feliz is everywhere, not just at Christmas. It is said 296.9 times per million words, because it is also every "I’m happy" and "happy birthday"; felices is said 51.5 times. No single-word count can say how many of them were Christmas.
• Noel is said more often than Claus, at 12.1 per million against 8.4. That leans towards Papá Noel over Santa Claus in subtitles, though Noel is also a man’s name, and Claus a surname.

Two cautions. Most of these subtitles are translations of English-language films and series, so this is largely what translators chose for American Christmas films, not how families in Madrid or Mexico City talk. And the collection mixes subtitles from Spain and Latin America, so it cannot say which words belong to which side of the Atlantic.

José Feliciano’s Feliz Navidad

The song most English speakers know the phrase from is "Feliz Navidad", written and first recorded in 1970 by the Puerto Rican singer-songwriter José Feliciano. He wrote it while homesick in a Los Angeles studio, missing his family at Christmas. It sets the Spanish greeting beside an English verse.

It took a long time to climb the charts. Feliciano’s original first reached the Billboard Hot 100 only in January 2017, and entered the top ten in December 2020, peaking at number six. In 2010 the 1970 recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Learn the language behind the greeting

A greeting is the first sentence of a language. Verbavia teaches Spanish from the most common words up, a lesson a day, free on the web.

The same greetings in eight other languages are in Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in 9 languages, and the autumn festival has its own page: Happy Halloween in other languages, with truco o trato and the words for Día de Muertos.

German has its own page of card wishes, with the Swiss, Austrian and Low German versions, in Merry Christmas in German.

New Year has a page of its own, with wishes for 1 January, the chimes at the Puerta del Sol and where the twelve grapes came from: Happy New Year in Spanish.

A longer vocabulary list, 92 Christmas words from el árbol to el turrón ranked by how often films say them, is in Christmas words in Spanish.

Merry Christmas has its own page in French, Italian, Chinese and Portuguese too.

Sources

• Real Academia Española and ASALE, Diccionario de la lengua española (23rd edition, online version 23.8.1): navidad (etymology from late Latin nativitas, the three senses, the plural navidades), feliz (from Latin felix), pascua (Easter, the Nativity as one of the pascuas, and Pascuas as the season to Epiphany), nochebuena, Nochevieja, epifanía (6 January), rey (Reyes Magos), inocentada, aguinaldo, villancico, belén, nacimiento, pesebre, turrón, rosca and pasar (its conjugation).
• Real Academia Española and ASALE, Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (2nd edition): Navidad, Nochebuena, Nochevieja, vosotros (where vosotros is used and where ustedes replaces it) and seseo (where z is said as s).
• FundéuRAE, navidad, claves para una buena redacción (19 December 2025): capital letters, año nuevo, crismas, belén, papanoel.
• Wiktionary: the Spanish translations of nativity scene and Santa Claus, with the countries for each; Viejito Pascuero; feliz (pronunciation in Spain and Latin America); feliz Navidad and felices fiestas; que (with the subjunctive, a wish: que te vaya bien).
• Wikipedia: Feliz Navidad (song)), for the 1970 recording, the chart history and the Grammy Hall of Fame; Twelve Grapes; Las Posadas; Biblical Magi, for the Kings as gift-bringers on 6 January and the countries named; Massacre of the Innocents, for 28 December as a day of pranks; New Year’s Eve, for Nochevieja and Fin de Año in Mexico; and in Spanish, Año viejo and Roscón de Reyes.
• 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, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The counts are computed by scripts/frequency_navidad.py in Verbavia’s repository and printed from its output rather than typed.