A little boy who noticed the huge red-and-green sign spray-painted on a department story: "Happy Xmas." And he wondered aloud about the X. Why was it X-mas? And finally, in a forlorn voice, he asked his dad: "Did they cross Christ out of Christmas, Daddy?" And the father had never thought of it that way before, but finally nodded. "Yes, Son, I guess they did."
There's only one problem with that: it isn't true. Self-righteous hysteria over supposedly taking Christ out of Christmas by writing "Xmas" instead of spelling out "Christmas" is both uninformed and misdirected.
Christianity has a long history of using symbols and abbreviations to allow the early believers to identify one another while avoiding persecution. Take this symbol, for example:
I'm sure most of you recognize the icthus, the Greek word for "fish". But its also an acronym for the Greek phrase of "Jesus Christ God's Son is Saviour":
ICQUS
The letters from the Greek alphabet are, in order: Iota Chi Theta Upsilon Sigma.
The letter Chi stands for Cristos, which is Greek for Christ. In Greek, it looks like:
CRISTOS
The first two letters, Chi and Rho, which were used in the early church to create the chi-rho monogram which should be familiar to most Catholics:
Some of us are old enough that we took printing in shop class, so we know how tedious early printing presses were. Because of that, abbreviations were used to make printing easier, faster and less expensive.
In religious publications, the church began to use the abbreviation C for the word "Christ" to cut down on the cost of the books and pamphlets. From there, the abbreviation moved into general use in newspapers and other publications, and "Xmas" became an accepted way of printing "Christmas" (along with the abbreviations Xian and Xianity). Even Webster’s dictionary acknowledges that the abbreviation Xmas was in common use by the middle of the sixteenth century.
So, the truth is that the "X" in Xmas isn't the English letter X, but rather the Greek letter Chi which has been a Christian symbol for Christ for well over a thousand years.
By the way, Xmas isn't pronounced "EX-MAS", but exactly the same way Christmas is pronounced.
Its also true that Christianity has a history of taking what people already know and celebrate and incorporating that into the faith. That doesn't make it any less Christian. On the contrary, it is following the example of Our Lord when he walked among us. He used the ordinary things in life to explain God to us. The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed. The faithful are like vines attached tot he true branch. And this makes perfect sense, because God is present in the ordinary as well as the extraordinary.
Its also true that Jesus was likely born at a time other than December 25th, but it would be inaccurate to say it was a Christ "take over" of the feast of the Son of Isis. A round AD 200, Clement of Alexandria wrote that a group in Egypt celebrated the nativity on 25 Pashons. Sometime between then and 311 AD, earliest known reference to the the nativity as December 25 is found in the Chronography of 354, the early church adopted the Gregorian calendar in place of the Coptic calendar.
The modern Sol scholar Steven Hijmans states empahatically, ""[W]hile the winter solstice on or around the 25th of December was well established in the Roman imperial calendar, there is no evidence that a religious celebration of Sol on that day antedated the celebration of Christmas". Therefore the belief that Christmas is founded in pagan celebration really holds no historical basis when one considers it from a historical perspective.
After all, Roman Britain was the part of the island of Great Britain controlled by the Roman Empire between AD 43 and about 410. Christianity wasn't even legal in the Roman empire until Saint Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in 313. So it is unlikely that any Western pagan influence had anything to do with the placement of the celebration on December 25th.
Any Eastern pagan influence would have taken hold in the eastern church which retained the coptic calendar and Hellenist celebration. Even today, they celebrate Christmas on Jan 6th, the date the westerm church celebrates the Nativity.
Merry Xmas, folks!
