The abbreviation X-mas is an affront to Jesus, alias of God.
The reason why "X" marks the spot where "Christ" was in "Christmas" comes from the Greek language. In Greek, the "ch" sound in "Christ" has its own letter, chi, which looks like an X. However, like any guilty former Catholic, I know that the Bible was written in Latin, which must have been the language of Jesus, Moses and all the Jews.
I doubt that Jesus the Carpenter, a small business owner from the Middle East, would want his name associated with a language that gave us "homosexuality," "atheism" and "chronic diarrhea."
Replacing the Greek chi with the Latin X also brings along the vile connotations associated with X. They can be summed up in the three P's: pornography (XXX), pirates (as referenced above) and moonshine (from prohibition; jugs of it were marked with Xs).
Surely anyone preaching that Jesus was a boozing and lewd thief would go straight to Hell.
Pagan ceremonies surrounding the winter solstice are often cited as origins for the Christmas tree and Yule log traditions. Despite the enormous amount of historical evidence indicating how Christianity borrowed from Greco-Roman religion, I dismiss it.
Why would Christianity, seeking to supplant popular and widespread beliefs, adopt aspects of pagan religions as some kind of cynical popularity ploy?
I give you instead my alternative theory behind the Christmas tree. Trees were integral to ship construction since human prehistory.
When Helen of Troy's face launched a thousand ships, they were built from the cedars of Lebanon. When the Thirteen Colonies decided to sink the so-called "Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier" of Great Britain, they built the USS Constitution out of white pine from the Appalachian mountains. When Prince Eric killed Ursula with a sailing ship to the heart, Disney animators drew the ship with wooden pencils.
However, when steam engines became popular during the 1800s, ships began to switch over to iron and steel construction. The wooden shipbuilding lobby, or "Big Wood" as they were then known, panicked. Big Wood was down in the fourth quarter for its third fiscal year when they developed an ingenious way to recoup their losses through insurance fraud.
After the employees left the shipyards on Christmas Eve, bosses rigged their tree stocks with notoriously dangerous gas lamps and hoped the combination would create a profitable blaze. The workers returned to work a day later not to a charred wasteland but a beautiful display of lights and pines and decided to emulate the effect in their homes.
Big Wood subsequently went bankrupt without the expected insurance money and all the workers were fired by New Years Day.
The cocaine-laced beverage lobby likes to claim for themselves the origin story of Santa Claus but his true origin is more sordid than anything invented by coke fiends.
Santa Claus is instead the neutered result of political correctness when applied to centuries of glorious tradition.
Santa Claus' true origin is from the Dutch tradition of Sinterklaas. Sinterklaas lives in Spain in his hidden fortress all year long except when he sails to the Netherlands and Belgium on a steam ship on Dec. 5. He distributes presents to good children with the assistance of his servant Black Pete, an African Moor.
Because there are few actual Moors in the Netherlands, Black Pete is played by a Dutch man in blackface. Black Pete is also responsible for putting bad children into Sinterklaas' sack so Sinterklaas can kidnap and imprison them in his secret Spanish castle.
I assure you I did not embellish the preceding part because it needs no embellishment to stand in stark contrast with our watered down, tasteless American interpretation of the Dutch master version.
Only political correctness gone mad could have produced mall Santas who return children to their parents without considering the child's behavior and Will Farrell in white face paint as the title elf in the movie Elf.
I hope you, my readers, understand the true dignity of Christmas now that I laid it stripped and shivering before you. Pagans, pornographers, wood-mongers, and Mr. Farrell caused more damage than a Muppet reinterpretation could repair in one lifetime.
It is up to our generation to begin reversing the damage wrought by two thousand years of a nonsense tradition.
Chris Amorosi is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at camorosi@student.umass.edu.
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