CHRISTMAS means many things in 2022, from sharing to shopping.

A lot has been written about our developing festive ideas but have we considered how international the language of Christmas is?

For many, the old man in red will be ‘Santa Claus’, a name first cited by the Oxford English Dictionary online (OED) in the New York Gazette as St A Claus, in 1773.

This was a dialect borrowing circulating in the city that never sleeps, which came from the Dutch name for St Nicholas, Sante Klaas.

In early December 2022, an online search recorded 428 million hits for ‘Santa Claus’ while an identical search for ‘Father Christmas’ returned a surprising 996 million hits.

I checked again: in these times where real celebrity is being known by first name only, sure enough, ‘Santa’ returns a chuckling four billion worldwide hits.

With Cliff, Beyoncé, Ringo and Madonna, Santa can claim true, international fame.

‘Father Christmas’ dates from well before 1646 when first cited in the OED.

Some suggest the first personification of Christmas as old man with beard was from the London pen of Ben Johnson (arguably our first poet laureate) in 1616, the same year Shakespeare died.

One of the oldest words for what we now call Christmas is from Anglo Saxon or Old English as linguists would call it.

The OED suggests the former meaning of ‘Yule’ (the period December-January) is now obsolete. Yule was derived from Old Norse jól a 12-day seasonal feast.

The earliest reference to Anglo Saxon Yule appears, in Latin form, in a text attributed to Bede, from the mid-700s AD.

Our dear King Alfred himself would likely have had a different Yule from our warming - or edible ‘log’.

And while by that crackling, festive fireside, let’s look at how ‘tinsel’ came to us.

The earliest reference in 1502 is a description of satin and has a Latin origin as a relation of the word ‘scintilla’ or spark.

Modern French étincelé reflects this idea “set with sparkles, glittering” and shows how special this season has always been amid frozen winters.

Shiny things bring hope and that reminds me of our own dear county town, Taunton, with its name origin in the idea of the “glittering fire-river”.

Wherever you find yourself this Christmas, have a peaceful one.

Marcus Barrett is course manager of English Language A-level at Richard Huish College and a trustee of The English Project, Winchester.