In Toronto, the Royal Ontario Museum has changed the way it marks calendar years on the information tags attached to items on display. It used to mark years with AD and BC, the Anno Domini and Before Christ most of us grew up with. They feel familiar like Fahrenheit feels familiar.
BC has become BCE, short for Before the Common Era, and AD has become CE, Common Era. Curators at the museum had been wanting to make the change for at least 10 years, but had to wait for the retirement of the director of collections and research, who had been a champion of the more traditional BC/AD system.
There are two reasons for the switch. First, BCE and CE have been in use for many years in academic circles. Second, in not referring to Jesus as Lord they are felt to be more inclusive to populations that may not see Jesus Christ as Christians do.
In a tidy piece of irony, the first exhibit to use the new terms is the James Ossuary, the limestone box believed to have once held the bones of a brother of Jesus. The ossuary was in the news in early November when, after apparently surviving for 1,939 years, it was badly cracked while in transit to Toronto from Israel.
I like the idea of a more inclusive dating system: many years came before Christ, and many other religious systems exist.
It’s; a little funny that this is happening around Christmas, and I mean to use that word. I feel badly about the disappearance of the word Christmas, which gradually is being retired in favour of words like holiday or season: Happy Holidays, Season’s Greetings. At least neither of those phrases does a crude substitution the way “holiday tree” does.
In order to be inclusive it’s not much good to deny one religion’s holidays, to dumb everything down and rename particular and unique things with generic terms.
I always know it’s Christmas, even though I wasn’t raised to be Christian. Jesus is not my reason for the season. We didn’t go to church or say bed-time prayers, but we certainly had a day of stockings, mixed nuts with the tough-to-crack Brazils left for last, better quality chocolates, turkey and reading Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, where Christmas was also of a too-much-food, drunk-aunties and adventure variety rather than a go-to-church day.
All the same, I hate the abbreviation Xmas, and I hate it that the decorations and store displays go up so early, usually as the dregs of Halloween go on sale. But once Christmas comes around, I want it to be Christmas.
