Day 6 - Xmas is Wrong?

Growing up, we always heard that it was wrong to write Xmas instead of Christmas. It was said that those who do are x-ing out Christ and removing Christ from Christmas.

 

In studying Koine Greek (the language the New Testament was written in), you discover that the name Christ starts in the Greek with the letter that looks like our “x.” Here’s a couple things from the Wikipedia article about Xmas:

 

“In ancient Christian art, χ and χρ are abbreviations for Christ's name. In many manuscripts of the New Testament and icons, Χ is an abbreviation for Χριστος, as is XC (the first and last letters in Greek, using the lunate sigma); compare IC for Jesus in Greek.”

 

“The word "Christ" and its compounds, including "Christmas", have been abbreviated in English for at least the past 1,000 years, long before the modern "Xmas" was commonly used. "Christ" was often written as "XP" or "Xt"; there are references in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as far back as AD 1021. This X and P arose as the uppercase forms of the Greek letters χ and ρ used in ancient abbreviations for Χριστος (Greek for "Christ"), and are still widely seen in many Eastern Orthodox icons depicting Jesus Christ. The labarum, an amalgamation of the two Greek letters rendered as ☧, is a symbol often used to represent Christ in Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christian Churches.”

 

So, when one writes Xmas, they are really just shortening Christmas by using the age-old common abbreviation for Christ. They are not really removing Christ from it. (Whether they realize it or not).

 

So, I see both sides of the coin. For those who are not in the know, using the full Christmas would be better. Yet now that we are in the know, let’s now not get bent out of shape over the word Xmas.