The Meaning of X-Mas

This is a column by Jon Carroll, who writes for the SF Chronicle. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I figured I'd share with everyone. Enjoy, and by the way... Happy Holidays. ;-)
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The Meaning of X-Mas

This column is brought to you by the letter X, which occupies a singular place in our culture. It is a primal shape, easy to make -- so illiterate people signed their name with it -- and easy to recognize -- so it marked the spot, whatever spot you wanted it to mark. There's a suggestion that, in the shadow parallel world of letters, the opposite of O is X, except it's understood that O is always slightly inferior to X. O is the defensive team in football diagrams, and O always goes second in tic-tac-toe games.

X became the symbol that indicated banning or condemnation, probably because it seems intuitively like the letter of denial -- see the European street sign featuring a circle with a slash. Don't go there. An X has two slashes -- really don't go there. But because the forbidden is attractive, X also became the letter of titillation, and makers of porn movies kept adding X's to indicate that their product was even Xier than competing films.

Triple X rated! You've seen X-rated movies. We're three times as dirty!

In cartoons, dead people have X's instead of eyes -- that's how you know they're dead. A key feature of cartoons is cross-hatching, which is, at its lowest level, making a series of X's for artistic reasons. And X's are often called crosses -- the British version of tic-tac-toe is called noughts and crosses. Crosses stuck in the ground mark the location of dead bodies, presumably because Jesus was crucified (or crossed).

There's also a widespread misunderstanding of the word Xmas, which is not in fact a cheap modern way of denigrating Christmas. Xmas has an ancient pedigree; the Greek letter chi, which is an X, is the first letter in Christos, and the symbol was used as shorthand by early Christians.

(The other ancient symbol for Christianity is a fish, the exact origin of which is in dispute. It could reference the Greek word for fish, or it could be an allusion to Christ calling his disciples "fishers of men," or it could be something else. These days, it's mostly seen in the debate about evolution that is being carried on, oddly enough, by metal symbols on the backs of cars. I once had a vision of a jammed freeway with back bumpers yelling at each other as they waited.)

Some ignorant people have decided that "Xmas" is part of the "war on Christmas," which is an ill-defined but fiercely held belief that secular cultural forces have combined to make Christmas less meaningful. One proof of that is the phrase "happy holidays" -- and if you'd told me a decade ago that I'd live in a world where "happy holidays" would become a flash point of controversy, I would have asked for a damp washcloth and nine Valiums.

I am unable to discern a war on Christmas, at least Christmas as I have known it. There are sparkling lights and little bells and jolly Santas and yule logs and Christmas carols and creches, creches, creches. In the supermarket, I am enjoined to come and adore him, born the king of angels, and I do not believe that they're singing about Santa -- who, as the Christian St. Nicholas, was a rather less jolly fellow than he is now. I do not notice who is wishing me "happy holidays" and who is wishing me "merry Christmas," because the operative words for me are "merry" and "happy," and for those thoughts much thanks.

Christmas itself is a big mash-up of traditions. The early church leaders didn't really know when Jesus was born, but there was already a big festival around the winter solstice, so why not get a twofer? Meaning that a real Christmas would happen sometime in August, just to make sure that there was no pagan taint. And there goes the Christmas tree, because dragging a tree into the house and worshiping it, sorry, decorating it -- that's pretty pagan too.

And because Christ enjoined us to give our money to the poor, the Christmas presents would go to shelters and soup kitchens and rest homes, with nothing for ourselves -- and, human nature being what it is, that would pretty much throw the entire world economy into a tailspin. We'd have to get rid of "Winter Wonderland" -- a song in which a couple presumably has carnal relations after being "married" by a snowman; pagan pagan pagan -- and "Frosty the Snowman" (Frosty was not gathered in the manger) and of course "Rudolph," that plucky little secular interloper. And good King Wenceslas looked out upon the Feast of Stephen, which is Dec. 26, which would be: close but no cigar.

I bet we could keep the little bells, though. And we can keep the little drummer boy: He'll go marching through our dreams, pa rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum, with his drum.