Wordsearch: On the Origins of Christmas by Millie Slavidou
Christmas is just around the corner and there is an atmosphere of festivity and fun in the streets. We may now associate the word Christmas with thoughts of presents, of Santa Claus, of mulled wine and decorated trees. But have you ever considered where the word originally came from?
past participle of the verb mittere, which means ‘to send, dismiss, let go’. You may be thinking that this is a very strange word to use to refer to a religious service, but there is an explanation. For centuries, the mass was held in Latin, and this A Greek and Latin Pairing word, missa, is one of the closing words of the service. For English speakers In order to find its origins, we are going who had little or no real knowledge to split the word into two parts: ‘Christ’ and ‘mas’. You might now think that it is of Latin, this would have been one of the last words they heard every time obvious – Christ is the central figure of Christianity, after all. But there is more to they attended the service, and as such, the story than that. Christ is not simply a it would have stuck in the mind, until name. It was originally used as a kind of it gradually became the name for the service itself. description of what Christ was believed to be. It comes from Greek, from the verb χρίζω [chrizo], which means to annoint. The adjective derived from χρίζω is χριστός [christos], meaning ‘annointed’. Christ, therefore, is the annointed one. Let’s take a look now at the second element of the word: mas. This comes, perhaps unsurprisingly, from ‘Mass’, the name given to the Eucharistic service in the church. Yet again there is a little more to the story than that. Mass comes from Latin missa, which is the feminine - 46 -
