When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher told us never to abbreviate Christmas as ‘Xmas’. Her reasoning was simple enough that even a group of ten-year olds could understand it. One of my classmates immediately pegged the problem with making that abbreviation as “taking Christ out of Christmas.” It took me several years to realize that she wasn’t really all that worried about our spelling and what we wrote on our Christmas cards. She was trying to teach us about a symptom o