'Merry Christmas' or 'Happy Holiday'

[tw.]

ironic, don;t you think, when you consider that 'christmas' was held on dec 25th in order to supplant the pagan soltice celebration....christ being born nowhere near that date. now, the christians ....who are not taught the facts about their savior, just the stories, are up in arms?

[Griff]

Merry Christmas!

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by tw.

ironic, don;t you think, when you consider that 'christmas' was held on dec 25th in order to supplant the pagan soltice celebration....christ being born nowhere near that date. now, the christians ....who are not taught the facts about their savior, just the stories, are up in arms?

But December 25th is the date they have chosen to celebrate the birth so that becomes the holiday.

I've gotten several emails bitching about the use of Xmas instead Christmas and how it makes Baby Jesus cry. But Snopes says no.

The X abbreviation of 'Xmas' for 'Christmas' is neither modern nor disrespectful.
The notion that it is a new and vulgar representation of the word 'Christmas' seems to stem from the erroneous belief that the letter 'X' is used to stand for the word 'Christ' because of its resemblance to a cross, or that the abbreviation was deliberately concocted "to take the 'Christ' out of Christmas."
Actually, this usage is nearly as old as Christianity itself, and its origins lie in the fact that the first letter in the Greek word for 'Christ' is 'chi,' and the Greek letter 'chi' is represented by a symbol similar to the letter 'X' in the modern Roman alphabet. Hence 'Xmas' is indeed perfectly legitimate abbreviation for the word 'Christmas' (just as 'Xian' is also sometimes used as an abbreviation of the word 'Christian').

None of this means that Christians (and others) aren't justified in feeling slighted when people write 'Xmas' rather than 'Christmas,' but the point is that the abbreviation was not created specifically for the purpose of demeaning Christ, Christians, Christianity, or Christmas -- it's a very old artifact of a very different language.