Why is it called Christmas, and is Xmas disrespectful?
Christmas means 'Christ's Mass.' And the X in Xmas is not a cancellation but the Greek letter chi, Christ's own initial, which Christians have used as holy shorthand for a thousand years.
Christmas is, quite literally, “Christ’s Mass,” and the X in Xmas is not a crossing-out at all. It is the Greek letter chi, the first letter of Christ’s name, and Christians have used it as a holy shorthand for Christ for a thousand years. So Xmas does not take Christ out of Christmas. It writes him in, in Greek.
Christ’s Mass
The word is old and plain. Christmas comes from the Old English Crīstesmæsse, recorded by about the year 1038, meaning simply “the Mass of Christ,” the church feast kept for his birth. The mass in it is the same word as the service, from the Latin missa, which came from the very last line of the Latin rite, ite, missa est, “go, it is sent.” Underneath sits mittere, “to send,” the root that also gives us mission, message, and dismiss.
That little -mas tail is a whole family. Candlemas, Michaelmas, Lammas, and Martinmas are each the “Mass” of their own day. Christmas is just the most famous of a set of feast-days all named for the service at their heart.
The X is Greek
Now the part people argue about. The complaint that Xmas “takes Christ out of Christmas” is one of the most understandable misreadings in English, and one of the most mistaken. That X is not our letter ex. It is the Greek capital chi, written Χ, the first letter of Χριστός, Christos, which is simply the Greek word for “Christ.” Writing Christ as X is neither new nor lazy. It is ancient, and it is devout.
A thousand years of holy shorthand
Scribes shortened Christ to X, or to XP, in their manuscripts for centuries. English documents were writing Christmas as Xpes mæsse as far back as the 1100s. The chi-rho, the first two Greek letters of Christos laid one over the other, was a sacred monogram for Christ used by the early Church and carried, famously, on the banners of the emperor Constantine. Xian and Xtian have long stood in for Christian, and Xmas has meant Christmas since the 1500s. Far from erasing Christ, the X is one of the oldest ways anyone ever wrote him.
So is it disrespectful?
By its history, no. The letter that looks to us like a cancellation is in fact Christ’s own initial in the language the Gospels were written in. That said, the objection is not foolish. To an eye that does not read Greek, an X really does look like something struck through, and plenty of people simply prefer the whole, unhurried word, which is a perfectly fair thing to prefer. But if the worry is that Xmas quietly deletes Christ, the truth is the opposite. It spells him out, in Greek, exactly as his earliest followers did.
So Christmas is Christ’s Mass, and Xmas is Christ’s Mass too, only with the name written the old Greek way. It is the very same Christ who hides inside the word Messiah, which means the same thing again in Hebrew: the anointed one, carrying that meaning quietly for two thousand years, whichever letters we reach for.
The Monthly Lemma takes one everyday word a month and tells its whole story, beautifully printed and posted to the door. A quietly perfect gift for anyone who loves words, with a word like this one waiting inside every issue.
A word like this, every month
This is the sort of story in every issue of The Monthly Lemma, printed and posted to your door. A quietly perfect gift for anyone who loves words.