Let’s talk about Xmas.
To the uninformed, the word Xmas is a crass abbreviation, an affront to Christianity, and an example of how secular humanists are actively waging war on Christmas by trying to take Christ out of Christmas.
If you are the type of person who gets upset whenever you see the word Xmas, you have only your own ignorance and lack of historical knowledge to thank. Xmas isn’t something that came about due to a recent “war on Christmas.” In fact, it didn’t even start recently. If you’re reading this, you can be assured it didn’t even start in your lifetime.
Xmas actually dates back to — wait for it — the 1500s. And who do you suppose were the first offenders? The first people to use the abbreviation were devout Christians.
The Church itself used Xmas instead of Christmas. When you get riled up about Xmas, you’re actually wasting needless rage on a 500-year-old tradition of the church.
In fact, it was perfectly natural for the church in those days to call Christmas Xmas. X was one of the ways they wrote Christ, along with Xp and Xc. The letter X in Greek is called Chi and was synonymous with Christ dating back as far as the year 1021.
Christians using the letter X to represent Christ predates Baptists, who didn’t enter the world stage until 1638. There is more history behind Xmas than there is the modern evangelical church.
There is a deep history and heritage behind the usage of the Chi as a representation of Christ. The people who complain about using X as a representation of Christ, simply don’t understand the history, heritage, and depth of their own faith.
Deeper Dive: Another reason for the popularization of X and Xmas was due to the invention of the printing press. Typesetting in the 1500s was done by hand and could get quite costly, so typesetters would often abbreviate longer words. The printing press is responsible for the explosion of the Christian faith by putting the Bible into the hands of common people.
