No joke, but to someone who grew up in the UK, everything is wrong about that. It's "Merry Christmas" as someone else said. I take it you've not heard carol singers singing "We wish you a merry Christmas ... and a happy new year!"?

The John Lennon song is called Happy Xmas (even though the lyric in the song is merry christmas.)

LOL :D

Well of course the line of the song, and by extension the full phrase is Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year but there's nothing wrong or unusual about Happy Christmas on its own to me. I grew up here too y'know...
Yes, when you're saying them all together! There's nothing wrong with "Happy Christmas" on its own though. Perhaps it's a generational thing? I'm 24.
Uh, you got them switched. Sidewalk is never used in the UK. :P

Yeap. A pissed American is a pissed-off Brit. [ANGRY!]
A pissed Brit is an obnoxiously drunk American.
:P

Fancy a game of how's yer father? Euphemism for sex. Don't use it on lads, unless that's yer bent!

I made the mistake of picking up the Americanized version of one of the Harry Potter books. Had it about an hour when I returned it to the store and got the correct British version instead. Why? Because when a book is based in London, the main character shouldn't be paying for things in dollars.

Sheer stupidity. I'd guess the vast majority of Americans know the pound is used in the UK, so there was absolutely no reason to change things like that. Plus, if any Americans didn't know, putting dollars in the book would just make them ignorant, believing that they could go to the UK and pay for everything in dollars.

You have to wonder sometimes what goes through some editor's heads.
Happy Christmas is British :) I said it for the first 21 years of my life. In fact, I never said Merry Christmas until I moved to the US, and have since switched back to Happy Christmas, as most Thais say that here.
Like I said, not true :) I grew up in northern England and had never heard anyone say Merry Christmas, except on American TV, until we moved to the US. It was always Happy Christmas. Brits have only started using "Merry" as the UK has become more Americanized.

Wikipedia has this to say about it:

As "Happy Christmas," an equivalent that is commonly used in the United Kingdom and Ireland, as well as "Merry Christmas."

The really funny thing is, I've never heard sidewalks referred to as 'pavements' anywhere except imported books. We call them sidewalks here too. :)

But Adele is chasing pavements ;-)

No! They didn't?!

That is about the most stupid thing I've heard in my life. Well, no, but certainly the most stupid thing I've heard this week. If I was an American and read that book, I'd complain to the publisher for insulting my intelligence.

No, British films aren't subtitled, but there are some who wont understand the dialog.
As for books, I usually pick up the British version of a book if possible since English books tend to be dumbed down in terms of language.

Actually that's not true ... some (not all, but some) British movies have been released with subtitles and occasionally they were even re-dubbed to tamp down the accents (especially Scottish ones). Thankfully the latter has come to an end. Trainspotting when it was released in America did both - subtitles and re-dubbing - as well as some other edits. I'm pretty sure the first Mad Max, Australian rather than Brit but still ..., was re-dubbed for American audiences as well. The Long Good Friday provided a primer in the beginning of the movie for American audiences ("grass" in British crime idiom when it was released meant informant, in American it means marijuana). Brassed Off did the same, but that was for comedic purposes and I'm pretty sure they had that in the British release as well as the American one, but I could be wrong.

There is one expression of which the American version (or at least some Americans' version) is simply and objectively wrong. I'll let David Mitchell explain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw

In a way, this is similar to what happened to the movie Demolition Man. For those who don't know the movie, it includes a scene set at a Taco Bell restaurant. Now, Taco Bell has no presence in Europe, so the studio was afraid that a European audience wouldn't understand a joke involving the restaurant chain.

From Wikipedia: As a result, the Demolition Man DVD I own is the bastardized version. It's extremely annoying to watch the changed bits. They only dubbed over the words "Taco Bell", and not the rest of the sentence. Since the dubbing was recorded in a sound studio (presumably), or at least under completely different circumstances than when the scene was originally shot, you can clearly tell, even with your eyes shut, that the two words "Pizza Hut" have been added later, because they sound different from the rest of the sentence. Of course, if you have your eyes open, you can also clearly see people mouthing the words "Taco Bell".

Taco Bell is a restaurant franchise, which is made obvious from the context in the movie. The joke involving it plays on the fact that it is a franchise, and has nothing to do with Taco Bell otherwise, they could have used any restaurant franchise. I assume that's why they felt they could just as well replace it with Pizza Hut, but it also means that it doesn't matter. As long as people understand that it's a franchise, they'll get the joke, even if they don't know that particular franchise. Which again means that they fucked up the movie for no good reason, and that I can only get the fucked up version of the movie where I live.

Sorry, end of rant. That particular thing has just always pissed me off to no end.

Broadly speaking, I don't like it when vocabularies are being diminished. As someone whose mother tongue isn't English, but who reads a lot of stuff in that language, coming upon terms I'm not familiar with happens again and again. Don't mind that at all. There are so many reasons for why a bigger vocabulary is desirable.

The example in the original post does strike me as a dumbing down of language, albeit an admittedly very minor one.