100 Years Ago in Macon: The war on ‘Xmas’; mail for soldiers; fruit for the needy

Today’s dive into our archives turns up stories from The Telegraph on Dec. 20, 1916, when the newspaper included items about a fruit giveaway to Macon’s poor and an opinion piece about “a corruption for which there is no excuse” — abbreviating Christmas as “Xmas.”

The editorial-page bit about “Xmas” declared the abbreviation “an indictment involving every canon of good taste, reverence and rightness.”

The three-paragraph exposition went on:

Why people write it “Xmas” is one of the puzzles of the time. ... To those who believe in a spiritual Christianity it is a direct and entirely needless affront. To substitute for the word Christ the Capital letter X, just because some hurried checker on a bill of lading some time wrote it that way, is pretty close to the sacrilegious if not actually in commission of it.

Some of the news in Macon that day was about how city sanitary inspectors would, as a headline put it, “Play Role of Santa Claus,” by delivering fruit to those for “whom the eating of fruit is only an occasional privilege.”

That is, the inspectors would for a day or so at the holidays gather contributions of fruit and other necessities and deliver the goods to charities.

Another story, one on the front page, was about Georgia soldiers who patrolled the Mexican border and how they were “flooded with mail,” much of it from “girls who are only looking for romance.”

This story was originally published December 20, 2016 at 12:26 PM with the headline "100 Years Ago in Macon: The war on ‘Xmas’; mail for soldiers; fruit for the needy."