our xmas tree!

Yesterday we put up our Christmas tree. And by "we" I mean Ams, Mandy, and Rob (though I did hang a good number of ornaments, and contributed with senseless picture taking). Although a few posts ago I quipped about how trees shouldn't be indoors for more than two weeks, I can't deny that I love walking into the house at night and seeing this guy all lit up. It's peaceful and serene. Mandy and Ams even put Christmas lights in the living room window facing the street. It's quite pretty.

And for anyone who sees fit to criticize the fact that I said "Xmas" instead of "Christmas", read this and learn. The use of "Xmas" in the place of "Christmas" isn't hacking Christ out of Christmas. This isn't some age-old battleground in that ongoing "culture war" where Christians fight for Christmas, or at least it shouldn't be. I remember when people got all hot and bothered by the use of "Xmas," and there were campaigns and such to get it banned. I'm not even kidding. We Christians can be pretty stupid. It's just an abbreviation, that's it, folks. Nothing to get riled up about. It's first use came about sometimes in the late 1700s, the -mas coming from the Old English word for "Mass," and the X isn't actually the English letter X but the Greek letter Chi (which looks like an X). This is important because our English word "Christ" begins with Chi when it's written in Greek. For the last 1000 years, might we add, the English language has been abbreviating the word "Christ" and things with "Christ" in it (like Christmas), not in the attempt to remove Christ from these things but to make it damned easier to write. Seriously. Who likes writing out "Christmas" over and over, especially when it comes time to send out the snail-mail Christmas cards? NO ONE LIKES THAT. And they didn't like it 1000 years ago, either, so they started abbreviating stuff. It carries on to this day, because we're lazy and we can get carpal tunnel in our wrists, so we do damage control. The point of all this being two-fold: (1) "Xmas" is no better or worse than "Christmas," it's just an easier way to write it, and (2) don't make accusations without researching what you're upset about. It should be common sense, but we do it all the time. All those people who got into a hoopla over Xmas didn't look like loving and devoted Christ-followers; they looked like sheep blindly following whatever they were told without stopping to employ some much-needed critical thinking.