Whether you celebrate the holiday or not, you’ve probably heard your share and more of cheerful “Merry Christmas” greetings over the past few weeks, and yet never once thought about the etymology of Christmas. There’s not much reason to, really--it’s about as transparent as English etymology gets: Christ (as in Jesus), plus -mas, from “mass, festival.”
That suffix, -mas, may be relatively unusual in English these days--the Oxford English Dictionary calls it “no longer productive,” meaning that new words are now rarely formed with it. But those three little letters are one of the last vestiges of a whole religious calendar that we’ve now largely abandoned in secular life--one that, hundreds of years before the Filofax, was the main way we measured the cycles of our year and the passing of time. In much of the Western world, the church calendar was the calendar, and the important events of the year were religious festivals--or pagan festivals, such as those around the harvest, that were synchronized with Christian saints’ days. Those days in England (and thus in English) often had the pattern “saint’s name” plus –mas.
