Cross Marks the Spot
in 'Xmas'
“Merry Xmas” “Big Xmas sale!” Xmas, is firmly established as a
commercialism. We tend to place it in
the same class as nite or hi (for high):
abbreviations contrived largely for
the convenience of advertisers. But Xmas is a more interesting case. It
is a classic example of a symbol firmly
established for one purpose being preempted for an entirely different one.
The X in Xmas is
the Greek letter chi (pronounced ky) In
Greek chi is the first letter in Christ--a point that is lost when the Greek is
transliterated into English as Christos or Kristos. X (the Greek and Roman letters are identical
in print) is also a symbol for the cross- a usage that survives quite independently
of any religious significance in traffic signs: PED XING.
For over a
thousand years X symbolized Christ. The
Irish refused to use the Roman X because it would be disrespectful to Christ.
So common was the understanding of this symbol that non-Christians who wanted
to preserve their cultural identity took pains to avoid it. The Chinese altered
their coins to remove anything resembling an X. They saw an inviolable symbol
of the Western religion and, Western influence. Early in this century, illiterate Jewish immigrants arriving at Ellis Island often refused to sign their names with an X
because of its strong Christian associations.
Xmas itself has a
long history as an English idiom. The Oxford English Dictionary, in about 1920,
defined it simply as a "common abbreviation in writing of Christmas.” The first use cited in the OED is from 1551,spelled
as X’temmas. The poet Coleridge used it
twice in letters, in 1799 and 1801. The last use cited in the OED is from the
popular British magazine Punch in 1884. We can see the secularizing trend at
work: "He's beginning Xmassing already.
The wholesale
expropriation of Xmas as a commercial term, however, has been chiefly an
American Phenomenon. Christmas itself
had rather inauspicious beginnings in this country. In 1659 the General Court of Massachusetts passed a law which
imposed a fine on "anybody who is found observing, by abstinence from
labor, feasting, or any other way, any such days as Christmas Day." These were Puritans, keep in mind, who were
inclined to take evidence that anyone might be having a good time as a sign of
”popery." While the celebration of
Christmas as a holiday was widely accepted by the time of the Revolution,
Christmas as a commercial holiday had to wait until after the Civil War. Gift
giving, a rare and personal convention
at the beginning of the 19th Century, started to become a social obligation. R.H.Macy’s department store in New York City stayed open
until midnight on Christmas Eve for the first time in 1867. Macy's first
Christmas window appeared in 1874.
Christmas grew into
what has been called "a spectacular nationwide Festival of Consumption."
Christmas advertising grew with it, but
they did not need to invent a new abbreviation for the nine-letter word denoting
the season. They simply used one that had been around for centuries. In less
than 100 years the usage of well over 1,000 years was largely reversed. What
once nearly everyone took to be a religious symbol, today nearly everyone
regards as a secular symbol.
Stan Freberg did
a novelty song several years ago, I think it was called "Green Christmas,"
in which he asked the musical question: “Who put the X in Xmas?”
