Living in Faith

In some blogs here, I featured St. Padre Pio Pietrelcina Chapel in Libis, Quezon City which we usually visit but not regularly. Then I saw this Christmas tree made out of probably thousands of different rosaries. Amazing 🙂

Thank you Philippine Star.

 

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Spelling Christmas

I always see these words everywhere. It seems as if the whole word is so hard to type that you have to write, “Merry Xmas”.   Christ with an X.  It’s just like those shortened version of text messages that sometimes you cannot understand.  How long will it take one to write the proper word with six letters compared to the four-letter word?

Accordingly, X can mean so many things. For example, when we want to denote an unknown quantity, we use the symbol X. It can refer to an obscene level of films, something that is X-rated. People seem to express chagrin about seeing Christ’s name dropped and replaced by this symbol for an unknown quantity X. Every year you see the signs and the bumper stickers saying, “Put Christ back into Christmas” as a response to this substitution of the letter X for the name of Christ.

There’s no X in Christmas

First of all, you have to understand that it is not the letter X that is put into Christmas. We see the English letter X there, but actually what it involves is the first letter of the Greek name for Christ. Christos is the New Testament Greek for Christ. The first letter of the Greek word Christos is transliterated into our alphabet as an X. That X has come through church history to be a shorthand symbol for the name of Christ.-  (Legonier Ministries)

I still prefer writing the word Christ though in Christmas, no abbreviations for me. It seems the meaning is lost when you just write X. Same thing with greeting someone with “Happy Holidays”.  Of course we know it is a holiday but for us Catholics, it’s a Holy Day.

So X is just the first letter of the Greek name for Christ.  Cristes Maesse or  “Christ’s Mass” is an old English term for “celebration of  Christ”.

Beyond the traditional festivities that we observe during December, Christmas reminds us of Jesus’ birth.  We start our nine-day Novena masses on the night of December 15 (for anticipated mass) and dawn masses early morning of December 16.  It’s a tradition for us. We call them Simbang Gabi or Misa de Gallo.  It is a unique Filipino celebration of  Christmas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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