The Phoney War on Christmas

When I was a kid growing up in the south, I was surrounded by conservative, especially conservative Christians.  I was an impressionable kid and some of it wore off on me, but like Christ himself, when I was a child I spoke and acted like a child.  Now, I'm an adult nd I don't do that so often anymore.  I remember reading the heartbreaking story of the father and son out shopping for Christmas presents and the child seeing the banner and asking his dad what that meant.  His father said that many stores used X instead of Christ because it cut down on the size of the banner and saved some money.  The innocent little boy's response "But why would they take Christ out of Christmas?"  So touching, heartwarming, and even a bit true.  But it's only half the story.

You see, Dad was probably a nice regular Christian father trying to explain the world to his son in the best way he could.  Dad was not a theological scholar and little Timmy was surely not a theological student and while Dad didn't know the whole story, Timmy would not have understood it anyway.  But I'm assuming the people reading this blog are not six-year-olds and hopefully can understand the whole story.

You see, early Christians didn't speak modern English and bibles were not available at the local book stores in the year 400.  In fact, the few bibles around were copied out by hand by monks - not available on Amazon.  Most were written in Greek, a language with it's own alphabet and Christ was spelled "Cristos" which in Greek letters looks like this: 

XΡΙΣΤΟΣ.  Now, in these days of keyboards very few of us ever actually hand write anything so it's a bit hard for us to imagine these monks sitting there at tables day in, day out, copying bibles by hand.  So, they started using shorthand and abbreviations every once in a while.  One of the easiest was using the Greek letter chi (X) for Christ.  So, often you would find Christmas written in church documents as Xmas. 

Even earlier, when Emporer Constantine became the first Roman emporer to adopt Christianity, it was said that in the visions that led him to conversions he would often see Christ represented as the first two letters of Christ's name, in Greek, overlaid on top of one another.  This looked like this:

Looks a lot like an X doesn't it?  So, here's an even earlier example of X being used to represent Christ.  Constantine used this symbol on banners he carried into war to spread Christianity to the rest of the world.  Another thing Christians are fond of doing, converting people by killing them off.  We have that in common with the Muslims.

So, if you buy into the whole War on Christmas concept, the first people to declare war on Christmas were the early Christians themselves.  Truthfully, the Puritans, often considered the first Americans, considered Christmas a rather heathen celebration looking at its roots in the ancient Roman Saturnalia celebrations.  And following the American Revolution, Christmas was totally out of fashion due to its association with England.  In fact, the holiday didn't become popular again after the Civil War when President Grant declared it a national holiday.

So, next time someone tells you to put Christ back into Christmas, please tell them that American Family Association brainwashed do-do head that no-one ever took him out!  And then go out and buy something made in China or India or some other country that enslaves innocent children to make toys that fall apart in two weeks.  Because that's what Christmas is all about.