The Ancient Roots of the Word “Christmas” (And Why We Use It Today)

The holiday season. The festive period. Yuletide. This time of year has all kinds of names and bynames, from simple catch-all generalizations to age-old terms with centuries of history. 

Holiday season, for instance, was originally an Americanism coined towards the tail end of the 1700s. Like a lot of similar generalized names, it refers to the fact that Christmas isn’t the only holiday at this time of year, with everything from Thanksgiving to New Year’s filling the festive calendar. (We’ve been wishing each other a “Happy Holidays,” incidentally, since the mid-19th century.)

Yuletide, on the other hand, dates back to the ancient roots of our language. Tide in this context just means “time,” while yule was found as geol in Old English, and was originally the name of a pagan wintertime festival to which Christmas gradually became aligned as medieval Europe became increasingly Christianized.

But what about the name Christmas itself?

The Origins of the Word “Christmas”

Given what the true meaning of this holiday is, of course, Christmas takes its name from Jesus Christ. The precise date of Jesus’s birthday is not actually known (some Biblical scholars and historians have even suggested it might actually have been September, if not in the spring), but the date came to be marked in late December as its festivities became confused with several older non-Christian wintertime festivals that took place at the end of the year.

The “mass” in Christmas, meanwhile, is precisely the same mass that is still celebrated in the Catholic church. Etymologically, it can be traced back via Old English into Latin, where it originally specifically referred to the dismissal of the congregation at the end of a church service. (In fact, mass is a distant etymological cousin of the word dismissal itself.) In this context, mass can probably be ultimately traced back to the traditional final words of the Latin mass, “Ite, missa est,” or “Go, you are dismissed.” 

So Christmas is literally “Christ’s Mass,” or the “Mass on Christ’s day”—that is, the Christian church service celebrated on the day that came to be most closely associated with Jesus’s birthday, December 25.

“Christ’s Mass” turned into “Christmas,” meanwhile, in precisely the same way that “St. Martin’s Mass” and “St. Michael’s Mass” became the traditional feast days of Martinmas and Michaelmas: presumably, the names for specific services, feast days, and other celebrations like these were used so frequently in the language of the church that the separate words in these names gradually ran together over time, and ended up compounded as a single unit.

Why This Word?

One question remains here, though. If Christmastime has had so many different names over the years, how come Christmas came to be the one we use the most? After all, Christmas is by no means the oldest name for this time of year, because the period we now associate with Christmastime was known as Yule, or Yuletide, long before the Old English-speakers of medieval England even adopted Christianity. 

In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest record of the word Christmas comes from the text of a homily by a Benedictine monk, Wulfstan, who lived in the 11th century (by which time, much of England had been Christianized for almost 500 years).

Yule, on the other hand, was mentioned in reference to what we would now better recognize as Christmas by St. Bede way back in the mid-700s. [PDF]

As Christianity became ever more established in ancient Britain, however, and the modern festivities of Christmas Day slowly began to emerge, it seems a name more overtly referring to the birth and celebration of Jesus Christ understandably suited the holiday best. The older, more pagan-influence name of Yule was therefore largely consigned to the history books, leaving us with the name—as well as the date, and its festivities—that we know and celebrate today. 

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