Do you find the word \u201cXmas,\u201d as an abbreviation for Christmas, offensive? Many people do. You won\u2019t find Xmas in church songbooks or even on many greeting cards. Xmas is popularly associated with a trend towards materialism, and sometimes the target of people who decry the emergence of general \u201choliday\u201d observance instead of particular cultural and religious ritual.<\/p>\n
But the history of the word \u201cXmas\u201d is actually more respectable than you might suspect.<\/p>\n
The abbreviation predates by centuries its use in gaudy advertisements. It was first used in the mid 1500s. X is the Greek letter \u201cchi,\u201d the initial letter in the word \u03a7\u03c1\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03cc\u03c2 which actually means \u201cChrist.\u201d Indeed X has been an acceptable representation of the word \u201cChrist\u201d for hundreds of years. This device is known as a Christogram. The ‘mas’ in Xmas is the Old English word for \u201cmass.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Do you find the word \u201cXmas,\u201d as an abbreviation for Christmas, offensive? Many people do. You won\u2019t find Xmas in church songbooks or even on many greeting cards. Xmas is popularly associated with a trend towards materialism, and sometimes the target of people who decry the emergence of general \u201choliday\u201d observance instead of particular cultural […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16382"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16385,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16382\/revisions\/16385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}