From an Australian Christmas card from 1908
(Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)
I remember when I was a young kid, going to my grandparents’ house just after Thanksgiving and seeing the boxes my grandfather was bringing down from the attic. Boxes of Christmas lights, ornaments, and other holiday decorations. On the side of the boxes was written “Xmas”. Why would my grandfather write an “X” where the holiest of names would normally go? Even to this day, I think about how to write the name of the most famous holiday of our time before I mark a bin to store Christmas decorations for the next year.
For most of us, that “X” before “mas” means one of two things. First, that it is disrespectful to the name of Christ because the letter “X” means the unknown and it is taking the word Christ out of Christmas. Some people believe that it takes the importance of religion out of the holiday and puts a stronger focus on presents, delicious food and other secular practices of the season. Second, the person who writes the word Christmas used the “X” because they were lazy, and this is the reason that I have written “Xmas”, for the few times I have, on a box to store Christmas decorations.
The abbreviation of the word Christmas goes back 1,000 years. It is not a modern invention. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a collection of writings in Old English which depicted the history of the Anglo-Saxons, used the abbreviation XPmas as far back as the year 1021. It was believed that later the “P” was dropped, leaving Xmas. There could have been many reasons that Christ was abbreviated in these early texts. One possible reason was because of early writings and the exhaustive number of times that Christ was mentioned in texts, as well as the expensive nature of the parchment it was written on.
Another possible reason was because the “X”, if turned just a little, depicts a cross. Many clerics understand that the history of the word could also possibly go back to the ancient Greek times. It is believed that the “X” resembles the ancient Greek letter “Chi”, which is the first letter of the Greek word for Christ. The old symbol of Chi-Rho, an X and a P inlaid on top of one another, looked like a symbol for Christ, when it came to the X portion of the symbol.
(Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)
Whatever the reason for the season, excuse me, word, it is all about how each individual person celebrates the season and not how they write one word that can cause people to be in an uproar about taking the word Christ out of Christmas. It doesn’t make the season any less holy and, for the most part, is used as an easier and faster way to denote and write the holiday name of Christmas. But I still will be respectful when writing the name of Christmas next time I write the word on a box.
An early Christmas card from 1907 using the name Xmas.
(Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)
Thanks for learning!
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