Christmas

An early glass of Christmas something

~ fishmandeville ~ Leave a comment
'Schofield family Christmas.' A Snowball might have helped. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
‘Schofield family Christmas.’ A Snowball might have helped. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Sometimes it’s useful to have some help easing through the early parts of Christmas day. This calls for a special kind of drink, if it’s drink you want. The principles are simple enough, but they require fine balance and nice judgement. Your drink should be apt to the season, it should be mild and undemanding, and it should set you up for the rest of the day. Let’s say that you could drink it mid-morning while unwrapping presents (if you have youngish children—ha!) or jawing harmlessly with the in-laws in that dead time before the food. If it seems unhealthy to be drinking before the sun hits the yardarm, at least it’s social, healthier than everyone withdrawing into their smartphones while one person cooks. Continue reading →

Do they know Xmas isn’t wrong?

~ fishmandeville ~ 3 Comments
chi-rho
Christogram (chi rho) on a mid-4th-century Roman coin. © Trustees of the British Museum.

Some people get awfully sniffy about Xmas as shorthand for Christmas. Wretched modern world, proto-textspeak, irreligious, ahistorical, next they’ll be calling it Pepsi-day.

As it happens, Xmas has been in use in English for centuries, and is recorded in a letter by the poet and polymath Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The ‘X’ stands for the Greek letter chi; in (ancient) Greek Christ is ‘Χριστός’. This abbreviation for Christ (often using the first two letters, chi and rho, Xρ) was common in ancient Christian artwork; it has an exceptionally long pedigree.

It may not be recommended for use in formal writing, and most publishers’ style guides are agin it, but it isn’t illiterate or crudely secular, a symptom of the commercialisation of Christmas.

Merry Χριστόςmas, everyone.

Paul Fishman (Bristol, December 2014)

(For more on the coin and Christogram see here.)