No, it isn’t too late for an article on Christmas because Orthodox Christmas isn’t over yet! I didn’t wish a merry Christmas on this blog, but a merry X-mas. You may think that I should decide how I want to call it. But I used both words synonymous because I want to explain the German point of view.

The Reverend of my village wrote an article some years ago to explain to the locals that X-mas isn’t a christian word. It would be used in the USA in order to avoid the Christ- in the word. So the word X-mas is constructed with the purpose to make the christian festival atheist and the X means to strike out Christ-.

Germans adopted the word, but would never have expected such a background! For Germans it is cool because it comes from the USA and it also useful because it has only five letters and written as Xmas only four. Germans usually wouldn’t care for the length of a word and famous examples of lengthy German words exist. But before Christmas will all shops sell all kinds of stuff for Christmas. The German word for Christmas is Weihnachten and it doesn’t contain “Christ” anyway! So Germans neither need or use the word X-mas for avoiding “Christ”. Germans use the word X-mas or Xmas for saving six or seven letters on every shelf! The word wouldn’t make a big difference on a greeting card, but it makes a difference if you sell Christmas stuff! Of course Germans believe that Americans use the word X-mas for saving four or five letters of the word Christmas too. Nobody in Germany expects that it would mean non-Christ-mas. I’m also not convinced that all Americans share this point of view and would never use it to save some space when writing.