Have Yourself a Merry Little...Xmas?

As a teacher of adult English in Taiwan, I routinely get asked all sorts of off-the-wall questions by my students, many about things I never thought about before until someone actually asked. And I certainly don't mean that as a complaint—in fact, it's one of the true joys of teaching English.

I especially enjoy it, however, when I get asked questions about religious holidays such as Christmas or Easter because it gives me a gift-wrapped opportunity to steer the conversation toward my favorite subject: the gospel.

One Christmas-related question I have been asked several times concerns the word Xmas, a common abbreviation for Christmas used by many people throughout the world. Students are generally just curious about what it signifies, how it came about, and why it's used in place of the word Christmas.

The more I thought about it, however, the more I realized it was a non-trivial question that struck at the very heart of the gospel and how people feel about Jesus Christ. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I owed my students a little more than "Oh, it's just an abbreviation for Christmas. Don't worry about it." The more I thought about it, the more I realized I owed it to myself to do a little homework.

What's in a name...

The word Christ means "the Anointed One": one consecrated or set aside by God for a holy purpose, and it refers to Jesus. "Christ" is not actually part of Jesus' proper name; it's a bit more like a title, and throughout the New Testament He is routinely referred to using a variety of combinations: Jesus, Christ, Jesus Christ, Christ Jesus, Lord Jesus, the Lord Jesus Christ, Christ Jesus our Lord, and so on and so forth.

In Greek, which is the language in which the New Testament was originally written, the word for "Christ" is Xριστóς (khris-TAHS), where the first letter X (chi) represents a throat-clearing k sound and the second letter ρ (rho) represents an r sound. In the centuries following Jesus' death and resurrection, these two Greek letters were often superimposed into a single monogram known as the Chi-Rho (or the labarum) that served as a symbol for Christ's name in many churches (as in the picture above).

Eventually people were routinely using the letters Xρ and X alone as prefixes in shortened forms of various religious terms that began with the word "Christ." By around the fifteenth century shortened forms such as Xmas, Xian, and Xianity (for Christmas, Christian, and Christianity, resp.) were in common use, partly to help defray printing costs with the advent of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century.

Note that the presence of X does not affect the pronunciation of these words. That is, Xmas is properly pronounced the same as Christmas rather than EKS-mas, although many people continue to pronounce it that way.

Call me Scrooge, but it's always been EKS-mas to me, and it always will be.

Bah, humbug!

The bottom line is that Xmas is just an old abbreviation for Christmas using the first letter of Christ in Greek. Nothing more. No evil conspiracy. No secular attempt to remove Christ from Christmas. It's just an old abbreviation originating within the Christian community.

Fast forward to modern times. Today, the English letter X (eks), which is derived from chi and is normally used to represent it in printed English, has a variety of uses, most of which are extremely negative. A jug labeled "XXX" traditionally contains illegal homemade whiskey, which if improperly produced can be toxic. The same label can also signify that a container holds some type of poison. A movie rated "XXX" (or even just "X") is hardcore pornography (we just say something is X-rated). If we want to indicate that something is wrong or unacceptable, we cross it out by making a big X through it. In many TV game shows, when a contestant answers a question incorrectly, an X appears somewhere on the screen or scoreboard, usually accompanied by a blast from a buzzer. Throughout the English-speaking world, the message of X comes through loud and clear:

No! Wrong! Evil! Forbidden! Eliminate!

Taking Christ out of Christmas?

With all the negative connotations associated with the English letter X, it's no surprise that many Christians around the world are offended to varying degrees when they see Xmas, with the word Christ replaced with X. There are people who are convinced that this is nothing short of a satanically inspired conspiracy to eliminate Jesus from the holiday that has for centuries enjoyed wide acceptance among many Christians around the world as a holiday honoring His birth...mwa ha ha ha ha.

For the record, it's just not so.

That's not to say, however, that there aren't plenty of people who would love to see the holiday stripped and gutted of any reference to Christ. For a lot of people, Christmas has long been much more about a jolly old man in a crimson suit than it is about Jesus Christ. A lot of people in Western society have systematically tried to minimize or completely remove Christ and other religious symbolism from Christmas through a one-two punch of commercialization and political correctness.

With a strong secular emphasis on Santa Claus, decorations and mountains of gifts—not to mention groups threatening lawsuits over Nativity scenes depicting the birth of Christ being displayed on public property—modern society seems to have come a long way toward eliminating Christ from Christmas anyway. Using the old Xmas abbreviation suits many people just fine—people who actually would prefer to leave Christ out of Christmas and who think nothing of appropriating the abbreviation Xmas to aid them in their cause, even though that was never its intended purpose.

Like it or not, Xmas is just an old abbreviation for Christmas formed with the Greek letter chi that, rather than eliminating Christ from Christmas, in a sense actually keeps Him there in the form of His initial. It was never meant to be disrespectful to Christ in any way, and to consider it so is to regard it in a manner that is simply historically inaccurate.

It's not that simple

I've heard people explain the Greek origins of Xmas before, and then smugly assume that they have settled the issue once and for all...as if all of us uneducated dolts who didn't know that was really the letter chi from Christ's name in Greek could proceed to use Xmas freely and with abandon now that we've been properly enlightened.

Well, not necessarily. Such people seem to overlook one minor detail: We don't speak Greek—we speak English.

When the apostle Paul and others wrote the various books of the New Testament nearly two millennia ago, they could have used any one of several languages; however, they all used Greek simply because it was the lingua franca of the day. After boldly preaching the news about the resurrection of the prophesied Messiah to the Jewish people, their mission was to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles as effectively as possible—and using Greek to do it was a no-brainer.

Centuries before English ever came to global prominence, the Greek abbreviations Xρ (chi rho) and X (chi) were well established and widely recognized as referring to Christ. Today, however, it's a very different story.

Greek has sunken into relative obscurity outside certain academic and theological circles, while English, for better or worse, has become one of the world's most important languages. About the only familiarity with the Greek alphabet most modern Westerners have comes from the names of college fraternities and sororities (or math classes they stayed awake through). The bottom line is that when English-speaking people today see Xmas, they don't think of chi—why should they? They think of eks. Evil, rotten, X-rated, get-that-junk-outta-here eks.

This is why many English-speaking Christians have such a deep-seated dislike for the abbreviation Xmas. Many are simply unaware of its Greek origin, which has become little more than a bit of historical trivia. Like many Americans my age, I grew up assuming it was an eks and that anyone who would use Xmas must really hate Jesus. Must be an atheist...probably a Communist, too. I had no idea where the abbreviation Xmas really came from—I learned all of this as an adult.

But here's the problem: Even though I now know all this consciously, I still feel a twinge of the same anger and righteous indignation every time I see Xmas. Those feelings didn't just vanish.

Knowledge may be power, but it's not a magic wand.

When someone hands me an "Xmas card," part of me still wants to tear it into pieces. When I see a sign or banner blithely announcing an "Xmas party" or an "Xmas sale," part of me still wants to rip it down. When I see the word Xmas, the message that still flashes through my brain is "we hate Christ and everything He stands for so intensely that we can't even stand the sight of His name."

I just can't help it. Call it religious fundamentalism (guilty as charged). Call it a culturally conditioned response (it probably is). Call it stupidity (just not to my face). But whatever it is, it's not easily remedied by mere education. On an intellectual level, I can tell myself a thousand times that the X in Xmas doesn't mean someone wants to get rid of Christ. I know it doesn't mean that.

The problem is that I happen to know a couple of other things:

So, does it offend me to see the name of Christ eradicated as if it were something intolerably vile and loathsome?

Does it bother me to see the name of Christ—my Savior, my Lord, and my soon coming King—deleted like a dirty word?

Does it rub me the wrong way to see the name of Christ unceremoniously dumped as if it were a politically incorrect faux pas?

Uh, yeah. It does. And I know it always will.

So what's to be done? All I can suggest is to (a) not use Xmas or (b) at least exercise sensitivity and restraint in its use, because it still genuinely offends many Christians even though it was never intended to be offensive.

Although technically the two words mean the same thing, in the hearts of many born-again believers there will always be a world of difference between Christmas and Xmas.

You know, on second thought maybe I shouldn't be too hard on people who spell Christmas with an X.

After all, Jesus did.

Greg Lauer — DEC '12

Top of the page

If you like this article, share it with someone!

 DEC '12 

Site Search

Powered by:
JavaScript Kit