Throughout December, I'll be posting selections from my recently published Holiday Anthology on a new blog "If Only for the Season." UUism's openness allows us to celebrate the many Mid-Winter Festivals with gusto. Here's my first selection.
One of my earliest Christmas sermons (c. 1980) was titled “Keep the X in Xmas.” And that would have been more than twenty-five years ago in a far-away place called Youngstown, in a long-ago time called the 20th century.
I also strained to explain a deeper quality in X, something that is truly timeless at the Winter Solstice, as enacted by the ancients who built bonfires on hilltops and rolled flaming wheels down those hilltops to coax the waning sun to once again wax toward the spring equinox.
For me the X-factor is real and still beyond my ability to describe fully: it’s what converges within and beneath and beyond at this time of year, something that motivates our spirits to break out in Mid-Winter festivals.
Keep the “X” in Xmas
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I recall that I was playing off a then current campaign by certain Christian groups not to use this common shorthand of Xmas. They contended that this was just one more ploy–a conspiracy really–by a Godless and hostile culture to secularize the Christian spirit of Christmas.
If you Google the four letter word Xmas, you can navigate to the Wikipedia notation (it’s first in the list) that says, in part: “Some people believe that the term is part of an effort to 'take Christ out of Christmas' or to literally 'cross out Christ';[citation needed] it is also seen as evidence of the secularization of Christmas or a vehicle for pushing political correctness, or as a symptom of the commercialization of the holiday (as the abbreviation has long been used by retailers).”
There are time-honored justifications to use X to represent Christ, but I took the clever tack a quarter a century ago, that X stood for an x-factor: the mystery and wonder of the traditional Nativity tale.
If you Google the four letter word Xmas, you can navigate to the Wikipedia notation (it’s first in the list) that says, in part: “Some people believe that the term is part of an effort to 'take Christ out of Christmas' or to literally 'cross out Christ';[citation needed] it is also seen as evidence of the secularization of Christmas or a vehicle for pushing political correctness, or as a symptom of the commercialization of the holiday (as the abbreviation has long been used by retailers).”
There are time-honored justifications to use X to represent Christ, but I took the clever tack a quarter a century ago, that X stood for an x-factor: the mystery and wonder of the traditional Nativity tale.
I also strained to explain a deeper quality in X, something that is truly timeless at the Winter Solstice, as enacted by the ancients who built bonfires on hilltops and rolled flaming wheels down those hilltops to coax the waning sun to once again wax toward the spring equinox.
For me the X-factor is real and still beyond my ability to describe fully: it’s what converges within and beneath and beyond at this time of year, something that motivates our spirits to break out in Mid-Winter festivals.
Then and now, I liberally call myself a pagan drawn to the natural, cycling rhythms of our earth-home. [p. 45]
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