God rest ye merry gentlemen.

It's almost Christmas, so much has become clear to me through the ridiculous amount of snow piled in front of my door and the fact that my entire family is foraging for presents.
The spontaneous urge to begin to sing the carols I was taught as a child has a tendancy to surface around this time of year.
The problem with the latter being that most of them have a religious character.
Something I have no real issue with, would it not be that it strikes me as profoundly ridiculous that during a specific season a habitual atheïst should burst into religious song.
Simply because it is part of the typical seasonal festivities.
You may argue that there is no real need to resort to religious song and that other more modern and ridiculous carols are available. I'm thinking along the lines of ' All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth" and " rudolf the rednosed reindeer" etc.
But to throw in a very feedle argument in my defence, the religious ones are so pretty.
"God rest ye merry gentelemen" for instance is a nice piece of music. Plus I can't possibly be the only one to recodgnize some sort of pun in the first line.
The placement of a comma makes quite a lot of difference in the meaning.
God rest ye merry, gentelemen -> God brings peace and happyness to you , gentelemen.
God rest ye merry gentelemen -> God brings rest to you happy people.
That is how it sounds to me , meaning wise. The latter, the version being sung today, doesn not contain a comma. Which makes it almost natural to believe we are talking about 'merry gentelemen'. The phrase 'merry gentelemen' brings to mind men in suits, preferably looking like they just walked out of a Dickens story, all looking slightly redfaced from the copious amounts of alcohol almost religiously consumed at Christmas parties. The mental imagery of these gentelemen slouched in loungechairs by the fire followed by ' remember christ our saviour was born on Christmas day'. Reminds me of a E.A Poe story about an apparition a drunken man had. He believed to have seen an angel that looked vaguely like a brandy bottle and other household appliances available at the time.
It may also be a sign of a cynical mind that terms used to envoke happyness automatically remind me of drunkenness. At least I had a good laugh about it.