It’s that time of year again. Yay! I bloody love Christmas. But I never call it Xmas (unless it’s on a really small gift tag and I can’t fit the whole thing in) because of an innate wordy snobbery against modern, lazy abbreviations (IMO). I’m not the only one – ‘Xmas’ has long been vilified by writing style guides including the BBC, The Times and The Guardian. In fact, the latter says this: ‘Christmas is preferable unless you are writing a headline, up against a deadline, and desperate (or quoting Slade's Merry Xmas Everybody)’. Ouch. And one Millicent Fenwick (who I’d never heard of, but I’ve since realised is pretty darn awesome) said that it ‘should never be used’ in greeting cards in Vogue’s Book of Etiquette (published in 1948).
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.
Another reason people don’t like the word ‘Xmas’ is because it’s seen as an evil secular attempt to take the religious stuff out of Christmas (as it removes the ‘Christ’ bit) and commercialise it even more than we do already. Those secular bastards.
But, after doing my usual not-at-all in-depth research, it turns out this is all a load of Christmas balls – ‘Xmas’ does have a religious backstory, and it isn’t a modern abbreviation, as it dates all the way back to the 16th century.
Unwrapping Christmas
Before we get into the ‘x’, let’s start with the word ‘Christmas’. It’s a pretty straightforward one – it’s a concatenation (which is a fancy-dancy way of saying that it’s two words smooshed together) of Christ (as in the big JC) and mass (I don’t know what happened to the second ‘s’). Simple. So when did the ‘x’ sneak in? The answer to this is, a frickin’ long time ago.
My big fat Greek Christmas
In the Greek alphabet, X is the symbol for the letter ‘chi’. ‘Chi’ is the first letter of the Greek word for Christ which is Χριστός (or Christós, which is a bit easier on the eye). So Xmas still means Christ’s mass. It’s basically the same as when Christina Aguilera started calling herself ‘Xtina’, but with less assless chaps.
Early Christians used an ‘X’ to identify each other when they were being persecuted (vague, I know), and it also appears on several Orthodox Christian religious icons. And it’s used as an abbreviation for Christ in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (a collection of annals – stop it – in Old English which tell the history of the Anglo-Saxons) way back in 1021. So it’s deffo not new.
(Oh, and apparently people also used to use the abbreviations ‘Xtemass’ and ‘X’temmas’ for Christmas. But it looks like those ones never caught on, thank god.)
Still not convinced?
19th century pin-up Lord Byron (swoon) used the term ‘xmas’ in 1811, as did Samuel Coleridge (in 1801) and Lewis Carroll (1864). And even if it is Christmas, the traditional time for drunken fights, who am I to argue with them?
A very happy Xmas (dammit, I still don’t like it) to you and yours. See you in 2020.