It never fails to amaze me what Christians want to bicker about. Last week, out of desperation to get an article posted, I reprised a 2005 Biblical Worldview article that I had written about several Christmas movies titled Christmas vs. X-mas. Since I have come to realize that you need to develop a pretty thick skin when reviewing movies, especially for a Christian audience, I expected to get responses about the movies that I had chosen (or didn’t) for my “Top 5” Christmas movies for families. What I got instead were emails from people who wanted to remind me that “Xmas” was a perfectly acceptable abbreviation for “Christmas” since the “X” comes from the greek letter “chi.” This is true, and in fact this abbreviation was more widely used in 16th and 17th century writings as “Xian” and Xianity.” Kudos to my emailers for reminding me of this point, but I must say that this misses my original point.

My whole reason for using the Xmas vs. Christmas theme was to provide a simple contrast between what has become a super-materialistic, crass-commercialized economic windfall for retailers and the real reason for the holiday. C.S. Lewis did the very same thing in an essay that he wrote more than 50 years ago called “Xmas and Christmas: A Lost Chapter from Herodotus.” In this short social criticism, Lewis contrasted the materialistic festival of “Exmas” with the religious holiday of “Crissmas” as celebrated in the “imaginary” land of Niatirb (which is actually Britain spelled backwards). Lewis described the “fifty days of preparation [which] is called in their barbarian speech the Exmas Rush,” where the Niatirbians weary themselves with sending cards, buying gifts (whether they can afford them or not), and hurrying hither and yon so that “any man who came into a Niatirbian city at this season would think some great public calamity had fallen on Niatirb.” Upon comparing the celebrators of Exmas with those of Crissmas, Lewis asks the obvious question:

But I myself conversed with a priest in one of these temples and asked him why they kept Crissmas on the same day as Exmas; for it appeared to me inconvenient. But the priest replied, “It is not lawful, O Stranger, for us to change the date of Crissmas, but would that Zeus would put it into the minds of the Niatirbians to keep Exmas at some other time or not to keep it at all. For Exmas and the Rush distract the minds even of the few from sacred things. And we indeed are glad that men should make merry at Crissmas; but in Exmas there is no merriment left.”[1]

I am in wholehearted agreement with Lewis’ assessment of the two parallel celebrations and his article has only become more timely in the fifty-plus years since its publication. Whether or not “Xmas” is a legitimate abbreviation for “Christmas” misses the bigger picture of what it has become. I won’t begrudge my fellow Christians for wanting to retain the usage of it, but we must remain aware of the perception of the abbreviation from the culture. Covenant breakers will often co-opt or change the meaning of words in order to obscure their covenant-breaking. Should Christians also try to recapture the word fetus by using it instead of “baby?” After all, fetus is Latin for “offspring.” One of my emailers stated that “when I write Xmas, it actually reminds me of Jesus even more, especially when someone thinks I am ‘taking Christ out of Christmas.’” This may very well be true, but it completely ignores the question of what is being communicated to the intended audience. Are the receivers of his “Xmas” cards and correspondence also reminded more of Jesus when they read the “X?” I wonder.

P.S. Click here to read a sermon by Dr. D. James Kennedy on the materialism of the Christmas season. It is based around the old TV show “The Millionaire” and is called “Merry Tifton.”