farmdoc's blog post number 249

Smart I thought I was. And Jewish I am. So I’ve never been able to bring myself to write the word Christmas. Rather I’ve always written it as Xmas. Whoever’s Christ Jesus was and is, he wasn’t and isn’t mine. To me as a Jew, Jesus has never been more than an edgy activist member of my tribe, albeit admittedly his parentage may have been uncertain. Therefore, smugly, I believed that substituting the X for the Christ in the name of the festival celebrating Jesus's birth, rendered the whole deal irreligious. Too clever I thought I was. By far. But how wrong. Wikipedia tells me the Xmas spelling has a religious origin, too. In Greek, the letter ‘chi’ is written as an X, and chi is the first letter of the Greek word for Christ. The Oxford English Dictionary shows that the first known English use of Xmas was in 1551. Whether religious or not, the word Xmas fits on signs better than does Christmas. And it saves on ink or paint. So I’m going to continue using it. That is, until a totally secular version of the work Christmas comes along. P.S. Contrast the December Jewish festival of Hannukah whose various spellings reflect only the different transliterations of the Hebrew word חנוכה whose English meaning has no religious connotation.