Originally posted by tiggergreen
Since this holiday was instituted to celebrate the birth of Christ, it should be given due respect. If you do not believe in Christ, then by all means find some other term - just do not use "xmas."
The irony here is that Christmas, like most Christain-celebrated holidays is a co-opted holiday from an earlier religion. In this case, December 25th was a Roman holiday for their sun god, seems to be related to the winter solistice too.

On the other end of the timeline, I think that American culture took the Christ out of Christmas long ago. It is a sales event more than anything else today.

By the way, the other thing most people are unaware of is the peace symbol. This symbol is an upside down broken cross. The people who formed this movement in the sixties did not like organized religion or war, so they wanted to come up with something different. Their idea? "Peace without Christ" and thus the upside down broken cross. I often see people that display both the peace symbol and the cross and I have to wonder if they even know that these two symbols are a contradiction to each other...
Not to be intentionally harsh, but that really sounds like a persecution complex. A couple of minutes with google brings up a TON of hits on this story, but the only one that has 1st person information to back it up is the origin as a sign for nuclear disarmament. The writings of Bertrand Russell who was a member of, and for a time, president of, the Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War. Some of his letters from that time period explain that the symbol was constructed from the Navy semaphore signs for the letters N and D to represent Nuclear Disarmament in the mid to late 1950's. Here's the site that uses way too big fonts. Corroborating information is here.