Christmas or Xmas

I remember in my childhood days, I began to notice that people wrote Christmas as "Xmas". I did not think twice about it, as people told me that it is just an easier way to wrote the long word.

As I became a Christian, I notice other Christians reacted negatively to this shorten form, saying that people have remove Christ even out of Christmas. Some even openly say that no Christian should write the X to replace Christ...

But any one can do a bit of research, what I found is that the "X" is not English alphabet, but Greek, it is the letter "Chi" , the initial letter of "Christ" in Greek. (Mind you, that The New Testament was originally written in Greek, the Greek is the official language, not English! )

If you think negative of Christ and put a big X there, surely you would turn Christmas into another episode of X-File, something comparable to the strange fiction, that fact is even hard to believe. All you get is truly a Xmas.

But if you follow the old tradition of using initials of Christ in Greek, (the most common one is the Xp combination, the first 2 letters of Christ in Greek, chi-rho, not English), you will not be erasing Christ, but getting back into the root of the whole thing.

Next time, when you see Xmas, just remind yourself that it is Greek!