Public Service Announcement: "X-mas" is not a bad thing!

Every Christian has, at one time or another, held in the back of his or her mind, one thought during the Christmas season: our second-most important holiday (behind Easter) is co-opted every year by the masses and turned into nothing more than a celebration of excess and materialism. Quite often, people point to the abbreviation "X-mas" as evidence that the world is taking Christ out of Christmas.

Even if they think that's true, Christians can go ahead and smile -- because nothing could be further from the truth.


See, the general belief is one or both of two separate ideas:

1. Replacing "Christ" with "X" is simply a way to shorten the word when writing it out
2. Replacing "Christ" with "X" is a way of saying, "insert your 'god' here"

The reality of the word, though, is much simpler, although it is, at least in part, truly an abbreviation, though not nearly as sinister as some would have you believe.

It goes back to the origins of the word: Christ is derived derived from the Greek "christos" (meaning "anointed"), which itself is derived from the Greek "chrio" -- which means "to anoint". The entire word "Christmas" is from Olde English, where "mas" derives from "maesse", meaning "festival". So, we get Christmas as the "Christ festival".

But what about that pesky "X"? The Greek alphabet is distinctly different from our own, modern English alphabet. In fact, if we wrote out the analogs of our English letters in Greek, we see something interesting from the beginning. The Greek alphabet begins with the letters Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta. Those almost match ours, except our "C" is their "G". The true analog to our "C" is letter "Chi" -- for which the symbol is "X".

And to finally bring this around to the point: the Greek spelling of Christ ("Christos") is Χριστος. The "X" in "X-mas" is simply short for Χριστος, which translates to English as "Christ". The final form of the abbreviation -- "X-mas" -- dates back to around 1551, but is itself derived from "Xres maesse", which is the Olde English spelling of the full word "Christmas" dating back to the early 1100s.

So the next time you see "X-mas", take heart. And remember: there is no way we could ever take Christ out of Christmas.