Xmas

My mother, God rest her soul, had as many faults and foibles as I do. On the back of a #10 envelope (her, and now my, favorite place to make a note or write a list) she scribbled that she had "a lifelong interest in education." This so that I would remember to put the information in her obituary.

And she made sure that I had an excellent liberal arts education, for which I am grateful every moment of my life. She enrolled me in Catlin Gabel School, a private grade and high school, when I was eleven; she continued to pay my tuition at Reed College even after I got married at the age of twenty; and she paid for me to get a master's degree at Portland State University when I was twenty-eight.

The summer I was fifteen, she had me take a class with her at Reed, Calligraphy, taught by Lloyd J. Reynolds (1902-1978). If you have ever had a great teacher, you know that his or her light stays with you for the rest of your life.

The way Lloyd approached his subject, calligraphy was more than the "study of beautiful writing." It was also the study of people representing their ideas in symbols and letters. So he began teaching us by going through the alphabet. Aleph, our letter A and a, came to us through the Phoenician alphabet from an Egyptian hieroglyph representing an ox's head, the bar on the A representing the ox's horns. And so on.

By the time he got to the letter X and x, he explained that the word Xmas was not a tacky modern abbreviation, like the word nite for night, but that it represented X, the Greek letter Chi, a short form of Christ. Xmas was first used as early as 1100. Even today, though, the word is considered informal, and not appropriate in the best writing.