So go on then… you have a pile of cards to write and a hundred other things to do before Christmas Day. What do you write on your cards – ‘Christmas’, or ‘Xmas’?

I always write ‘Merry Christmas’ in full – at some point in my teen years I decided it was lazy not to write the full word. Your decision may have been for more serious reasons, like the campaign to “Keep the ‘Christ’ in Christmas” or concerns about the over-commercialisation and secularisation of the religious event, as seemingly represented by the word ‘Xmas’. All the more so because it’s well-known that in algebra ‘X’ stands in for ‘the unknown’.

It came as a surprise then, as my family research progressed, when I started to notice ‘X’ as an abbreviation for ‘Christ’ in church records. 

In this extract from the parish register of Norwich St Martin at Oak, an 1819 Baptism entry was amended in 1836 to correct the mother’s name of Sophia: ‘This Xpn name sh[oul]d be Lucy…’

Instead of ‘Christian’, the letters ‘Xpn’ are used.

There are also of course many examples of the name Christopher being recorded as Xpher or Xpoferus. Thankfully, I have not found any document in which my 5x Great Grandfather Christopher Christian is recorded as Xpher Xpn. (Perhaps he is, but no one indexed it correctly!)

These seemed to me to fall foul on all counts – first, because this was supposed to be a solemn record and teenage me had already decided such documents needed to be written in full; and secondly in that these were *Church* records, where Christ was by definition at the forefront of procedings.

There had to be another explanation; and of course there is. In fact, in English ‘X’ was first used as a scribal abbreviation for ‘Christ’ in 1100; in 1551 ‘X’temmas’ appeared; and by 1721 ‘Xmas’ was in regular use as an abbreviation for ‘Christmas’. (See: Wikipedia: Xmas) It is thought that these abbreviations came about as a cost-saving practice: the cost of parchment was so expensive that any ways of saving space in the text were welcomed.

However, the history behind the abbreviation is even more susprising. The first letter is not actually Latin script, but a Greek X, pronounced Ch (as in ‘Christmas’). In the abbreviation for Christopher (Xpher) the second letter is not necessarily part of the ‘pher’: the Greek letter ‘ρ’ is pronounced ‘r’; and in Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Church of England and Episcopalian forms of Christianity, the ‘Xρ’ has long been an accepted abbreviation for Christ, or ‘Christos’ (Χριστός). Over time, in English scribal abbreviations, the second letter – the ‘ρ’/ ‘r’ – was dropped in the word ‘Xmas’.

So there you are - when we write ‘Xmas’, we’re not being lazy; we’re following a long tradition in Christian scripts of abbreviating using the ancient Greek alphabet.

Now… since this is supposed to be a blog about genealogy research, not linguistics, I hope you’ll find the following link useful: more abbreviations you may find in parish registers and other genealogy records, courtesy of FamilySearch.

And on that note all that remains is for me to wish you a very Happy Christmas (or Xmas, if you wish) and a Happy and Healthy New Year. See you in January.