Rediscovering Boxing Day

An article by Frank    1 Comment

Boxing Day has come to be known as a shopping holiday here in Aotearoa/New Zealand (I’m not familiar with what other countries do on December 26th so can’t comment on that). It’s a day when there are bargains galore and stores flick off all the stock they couldn’t move before Christmas so that they can make way for new stock in the New Year.

Understandably, people go out in their droves to take advantage of these sales on Boxing Day. In the midst of it, the origins and early traditions of Boxing Day have been lost and most people nowadays seem to have little idea about what how we came to have a day following Christmas called “Boxing Day”. It’s now at the point where some people think it is called Boxing Day because that’s when you throw out all the boxes from the presents received on Christmas day.

Boxing Day is so much more than that. Boxing Day is a day with an extremely rich heritage that directly relates to exactly what this blog is about – humanitarianism.

Boxing Day, which is strongly related to St Stephen’s day, also has roots in the ancient festival of Saturnalia. Saturnalia was a festival celebrated in the ancient Roman empire and was in place to mark the commemoration of the temple of the god, Saturn. One of the distinct marks of the festival was social role reversal – where slaves and masters would switch places.

Boxing Day continues this tradition by morphing it into something that takes on board Christian “charity” and a concern for the poor.

There is a good explanation at Wikipedia (the fountain of all trustworthy knowledge) of what traditionally took place on Boxing Day amongst the social classes of the U.K and thus spread to the rest of the commonwealth:

Boxing Day dates back to past centuries when it was the custom for the wealthy to give gifts to employees or to people in a lower social class.

A Christmas box is, in English tradition, a clay box used in artisan shops. Apprentices, masters, visitors, customers, and others would put donations of money into the box, like a piggy bank, and then, after Christmas, the box would be shattered and all the contents shared among the workers of the shop. Thus, masters and customers could donate bonuses to the workers anonymously, and the employees could average their wages. The habit of breaking the Christmas box lent its name to Boxing Day. The term “Christmas box” now refers generally to a gift or pay bonus given to workers. The Oxford English Dictionary attributes it to the Christmas box; the verb box meaning: “To give a Christmas-box (colloq.); hence the term boxing-day.” The date coincides with the Feast of St. Stephen.

• It was the day when people would give a present or Christmas box to those who had worked for them throughout the year.
• In England, it was common practice for the servants to carry boxes to their employers when they arrived for their day’s work on the first working day after Christmas. Their employers would then put coins in the boxes as special end-of-year gifts. This can be compared with the modern day concept of Christmas bonuses. The servants carried boxes for the coins, hence the name boxing day.

Whilst the tradition of a special payment for employees has shifted to the Christmas bonus, the idea of provisions for the less fortunate on Boxing Day is a rich tradition that would serve our world well if it was reclaimed. Boxing Day can again be so much more than just a shopping holiday.