Don’t have a cow over Xmas.
X means a lot of things. For example, X denotes an unknown quantity, a pair means poison and in triplicate, it’s an obscene film rating. But people express chagrin when seeing Christ’s name lazily dropped and replaced by X. Every holiday season signs and bumper stickers scream out, “Put Christ back into Christmas!” as a response to this substitution as if there’s not already an X in Christmas.
Yes, there is already an X in Christmas.
Understand it’s not the letter X that is put into Christmas. It’s already there. We see the English letter but X is actually the first letter of the Greek name for Christ. Christos is New Testament Greek for Christ. The first letter of the Greek word Christos is transliterated into our alphabet as an X. That X has trudged through a lot of church history to be a shorthand symbol for the name of Christ with no disrespect.
We don’t see people protesting the use of the Greek letter theta, which is an O with a line across the middle, and we use that as a shorthand abbreviation for God because it is the first Greek letter in Theos, the Greek word for God.
Both X and O have long and sacred histories. The church has also used the symbol of the fish historically because it’s an acronym. Fish in Greek (ichthus) involved the use of the first letters for the Greek phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” So early Christians would take the first letter of those words and put them together to spell the Greek word for fish. That’s how the symbol of the fish became the universal symbol of Christendom.
So don’t have a cow over Xmas.
Merry Xmas to you and yours!
XOXOXO