i have this little problem with x-mas.
specifically with people writing ‘x-mas’ insteadof ‘christmas’.
i don’t think that ‘x-mas’ is wrong or blasphemous. it’s just that ‘x-mas’ seems a bit harsh when you consider all of the nice associations that usually attend christmas.
i wonder who first replaced ‘christ’ with ‘x’?it does seem to be kind of odd.
and i’m sure that people will continue to write ‘xmas’ and i’m sure that i will continue to flinch whenever i see ‘xmas’ written in place of ‘christmas’.
does that make any sense?
probably not, seeing as i haven’t really explained it.
as you might or might not know, i’m a weird sort of christian.
i don’t belong to any denomination and i don’t think that any religion is ever ‘right’, but i do have a great love and fondness for christ, thecharacter of christ, and the teachings of christ.maybe that’s why i flinch when i see ‘xmas’ written in the place of ‘christmas’.
if you had a friend named jennifer whom you loved you might flinch if someone invited you to a posthumous birthday party for her and referred to her as z-nifer.
although it does have a very contemporary ring to it.
x-box.
x-men.
x-ray.
x-games.
x-mas.
and i sometimes wonder about peoples motivation for abbreviating things wherein the abbreviation really isn’t that much shorter than the thing being abbreviated.
like ‘addy’ for ‘address’. you save 3 letters and you end up with a very silly sounding word. and you don’t even gain a syllable. some abbreviations could make sense.
suppose you took ‘defenestration’ and condensed it to ‘defen’. that would make sense. you would save time and syllables.
but condensing ‘address’ to ‘addy’ really doesn’t do much for the condenser in terms of time and syllable conservation.
and condensing ‘christmas’ to ‘xmas’ is just odd. colloquial and accepted, but odd.
and it makes me flinch.
so if you send me a christmas card could you do me the small favor of not writing ‘merry x-mas’?
like i said, i don’t think that ‘xmas’ is wrong or blasphemous, but it always makes me flinch.
but as we all know, i’m a woosie and i flinch easily.
and i hope that your holiday season is blissfully free of defenstration.
for you and all of your loved ones.
thank you.
moby