Happy Xmas.

Xmas doesn’t take the Christ out of Christmas, but it does reveal the ignorance in the complainer.

I thought I had ranted on this before, but I couldn’t find the rant. So here I go.

A lot of idiots complain about the use of the contraction “Xmas” because it “takes the Christ out of Christmas.” I used to be one such idiot until I learned the history of it; so let me share it with you. The “X” in Xmas is not meant to be the Latin letter X, but the Greek letter hi, which is the first letter of Χριστος, or Christ. It is a contraction, not a removal, of Christ.

When bibles were copied by hand, monks felt it was convenient to use contractions for Christ, for God, for Jesus, and various other words (usually names) that were going to be written over and over and over. So Χριστος was shortened to X with a line over it, Ιησους was shortened to I with a line over it, et cetera. Eventually someone realized that the best way to contract the word Christmas (which is after all a long word) was with Xmas.

Now the real idiots who want to take Christ out of Xmas are the people who are trying to get all the Xmas stuff renamed “Holiday” stuff. Fr’instance, in Boston they’re calling their downtown Xmas tree a “holiday tree.” Exactly which other holidays decorate a tree this time of year? The whole “holiday tree” title is insulting to Christians (it’s our holiday, after all); it’s insulting to Jews, who don’t have holiday trees; it’s insulting to Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus and any religion that doesn’t have a regular December holiday; it’s a title that’s just generally offensive to everyone except people that have no religion, and what business do they have in dictating to the Christians what we’re to call our trees?

But let’s not be stupid about the use of Xmas. Feel free to wish one another a happy Xmas or a merry Xmas, and for fun, go to your local department store and start loudly complaining about the lack of menorahs and dreidels in the “Holiday Decorations.”