An Ode to "X"

"Keep the X in Xmas" anyone?
Understandably, at the zenith of humanity's materialist obsessions, a sub set of citizenry want to keep Christ in Christmas. Their crèche and lawn billboards tell me so. Who am I to deny them that right? I have no intention of quashing their cause. But I do wonder, if I agree to let them keep their Christ in Christmas, would they scoff at my suggestion to keep the X in Xmas? It's not a cause or a psuedo-cause, it's just a 4 minute linguistic antic, reflex…Thoughts from a drive:
So, back to the non-cause of Xmas. Some of you may see X and think: a cross. True, and yet it is not just a uniquely Christian symbol, but a rather mutable symbol in the scheme of human history—the intersection of two lines need not necessarily incite religious connotations, but maybe an axis? Or, in my best posh voice, "anyone for a round of noughts and crosses?" Tic Tac Toe. For the Romans, X denoted the number 10, a known quantity… And if memory serves me correctly, X is a now-obsolete marker for December.
The letter X, as the Greek chi, has been around quite some time—before fraternities. You-know-who is in chi: X, paired with p, together they are Xp, with the proper diacritics, or the Greek abbreviation for, Khristos, dating back to the 12th century.
And much later on (or more recently?), the Frenchman Descartes introduced XYZ into the 17th century algebraic equations. (Math as language!) Of course, if you were an illiterate peasant, chances are you could have signed away your wife, life or land with an inked X, indicated by a bejeweled digit… And if you were penning letters to loved ones, after the 176Os, you might have closed with a finite chain of xxxxxx.
In the mid-19th century and in good humor, Thackeray wrote in Vanity Fair, that a slaughtered pig "weighed x stone." The appropriated, algebraic, adjectival x serves as a flippant, unknown quantity.
In the early 1900s? Ah, the ever-slippery X has learned to work both sides of the unknown and known fence called Quantity. We have the apparition of the X chromosome, yes, identifying the winsome feminine in the world of chromosomes. (And genes, are they not the helix of life? Who dares to belittle the birthing power of the X here?) And what if you want to make the quality of an ale or porter known? Well, you label it with the duplicate, uppercased, intimidating XX. To make the substance of a film known? By 1950, I believe, and by Parliament's hand, Britons began using the X to designate movies for those 16 and over—16 and over, you say?—and we thought the world was more puritanical then?
So, really, this is just a digression that reeled through a brain on a homeward drive, which, like the drive, must draw to a close… Even odder to think it was inspired by someone's version of lawn-bumperstickering, professing his or her faith… Lawn kitch so rarely arouses (that's not true, Travelocity is still reaping the benefits of Amélie's gnome…), rarer still are lone campaigns found on brown December lawns, seeking to stir…
In a fickle allegiance to the secular, I say, let's keep the slippery, polymorphous X, in Xmas or wherever it decides to rear, no, stretch its paradoxically crossed arms….