ever heard "Keep Christ in Christmas"?
Every year around the holidays, I hear something on this topic.
There's even a Facebook group dedicated to it.
As I see things, there are 2 avenues of thought related to the matter:
1) don't allow retailers/secularism to let us forget the very reason we have a "Christmas" to celebrate each year: it's Christ the Messiah's birthday
2) don't take "Christ" out of the word "Christmas" by replacing it with an "X".... as in "X-mas"
While I agree that #1 is a very valid, legitimate, and reasonable concern, that's not what I'm gonna write about here.
With this blog post, I want to focus on the X-mas issue.
On the surface, I understand what folks are saying..... when the "Christ" is taken out of "Christmas", replaced with an "X", that takes the glory, splendor, majesty out of the word.
We replace a sacred name with some random letter.
But, that's not the case.
"X" is not random.
And "X-mas" gets a bad rap.
This summarizes things pretty well:
The idea of X as an abbreviation for the name of Christ came into use in our culture with no intent to show any disrespect for Jesus. We see the English letter X there, but actually what it involves is the first letter of the Greek name for Christ.
ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ, transliterated as Christos, is the New Testament Greek for Christ. The first letter of the Greek word Christos is transliterated into our alphabet as an X. That X has come through church history to be a shorthand symbol for the name of Christ.
So, X-mas should not cause a tizzy at all.
Christ=X. X=Christ.
Before I knew this information, I took offense whenever I'd see "X-mas" on a retailer sign, Christmas card, or TV commercial. In fact, just a few weeks back, I came across this at Jimmy John's:
I love it!
In an attempt to shorten "Christmas" by 5 letters and/or make a vain attempt to eliminate the true reason for Christmas from the word itself, they have succeeded in taking the word back to its true roots. Wonder if they know that?
:)
Now, the folks that insist on saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas".... that's a whole 'nuther story.
Out for now....
Matt
