upload January 8, 2006
During the Second World War or just after the war, I learnt a sentence, “December the 25th is Christmas Day.” on an English textbook. I can remember a picture of a sleigh pulled by reindeer on the same textbook. But I cannot understand Christmas because my teacher did not explain about the background of Christmas.
In every December of after the Second World War, everywhere I heard the songs, “Jingle Bell” and “Holy Night”, and saw the words, “Xmas” and “X’mas (a misuse).” Of course I had been thinking Xmas had come together with American soldiers. A few years ago, the English teacher of our conversation class or a radio English conversation program said, “Japanese people write Christmas as Xmas but we write always Christmas.” I vaguely wondered why we used Xmas, but I forgot about it soon.
Recently a classmate of the conversation class asked a British teacher why the X is used in Xmas. The teacher distributed material and explained about the X. He said that "When Christmas is written in Greek, the following Greek alphabetical letters are used: (chi), (rho), (iota), (sigma), (tau), (mu), (alpha), and (sigma).” Another classmate said “The (chi) resembles to X of English.”
When the above boldface letters are extracted and placed in a row, it becomes a word, christmas. This means Christmas is spelled “Χριστμασ” in Greek. (cf. Table 1) Maybe Christians know that the origin of Christmas is the Mass of Christ, and they must remind a cross and Christ when seeing X. So I suppose the Greek Χριστμασ was abbreviated to Χμασ and it became Xmas in English.
Table 1 Greek Alphabet
Large Small Pronunciation Large Small Pronunciation Α α alpha Ν ν nu Β β beta Ξ ξ xi Γ γ gamma Ο ο omicron Δ δ delta Π π pi Ε ε epsilon Ρ ρ rho Ζ ζ zeta Σ σ sigma Η η eta Τ τ tau Θ θ theta Υ υ upsilon Ι ι iota Φ φ phi Κ κ kappa Χ χ chi Λ λ lambda Ψ ψ psi Μ μ mu Ω ω omega