Christmas trivia.

As we're entering the run-up to Christmas, I thought I'd look at some of the questions which crop up every year at around this time. So, first off - is it acceptable to use Xmas as a shorthand form of Christmas, or is it just sloppy and irreverent? Not at all - in Greek the word for Christ is Christos and, written in the Greek script the first two letters are Chi and Rho. Chi looks very similar to our capital X and rho a bit like our lower-case p. Early Christians amalgamated these two letters into a single symbol representing Christ. The symbol can still be seen in churches today - here's an example:








We can't cope with this symbol in our alphabet of course, and so a capital X has long been accepted as an alternative. So Xmas is a perfectly acceptable way of writing Christmas - what you mustn't do of course is pronounce it as Ex-mass. That would be wrong!