I know how much of you hate when it’s celebrated too early. Not me! People bitch about shortening Christmas to Xmas. “Keep Christ in Christmas”, is what they say. Heck, I even used to wear a button as a kid because it bothered me so much back then. Why am I talking about this? Well, my sister (that’s us pictured about 6 years ago) and I had a jokey “argument” about it yesterday on text. Years ago, I did some research on it. And since I’m holier than thou, I’ll share again. This is from an excerpt of a post I did on my website back in 2005.
I did the research awhile back and found out when the “X” came intoplay. The Greek transliteration of the word Christ is Xristos, the first letter which is the Greek letter “chi”. The shortening of Christmas to Xmas by educated persons who knew Greek has been common since the sixteenth century, with the “X” often symbolizing a cross. “Xmas” was an ecclesiastical abbreviation used by churchmen in tables & charts. More recently the use of “X” has been associated with irreverent commercialism, leading to the saying “Put the ‘Christ’ back into Xmas”. The American profanity “Jesus H. Christ”, may come from the second letter of “chi”, and has been in the use in the United States at least since 1850.
There ya go, holy rollers. We good now?
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