Today we use “Eat, drink, and be merry” as an invitation to party, but to be merry originally meant to be content or self-satisfied.
The phrase is from a parable in the Bible that tells the tale of Epicurious, a man who worked hard all his life to accumulate goods and money and believed that he shouldn’t take time to “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”
When Epicurious died he was remembered as a fool because he did not live for anything but the material.
The phrase also appears in Luke 12:19: “Soul, you have so many goods laid up for years to come; take your ease, eat, drink, and be merry.”
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