Boxing Day Tales

from Jacqueline

A longish essay, just to give you fair warning – but look at it this way, reading will help burn off those holiday calories.

At time of writing, it is early on Boxing Day.  If you’re pretty much anywhere in what is known as the “Commonwealth” – former territories of the old British Empire – you will be celebrating Boxing Day, unless of course you're in Australasia, where of course it was yesterday, as opposed to tomorrow, when this post will be published (which for readers is today ...). I tell you, that Old Father Time has the last laugh doesn't he?  Give it another few days and he'll be waving his scythe again while we get to grips with resolutions and goals, and a swaddled 2014 wriggles in the old boy's arms.

Boxing Day is probably one of the most sensible holidays of the year – indeed, I've never quite become used to the fact that, in America, once Christmas Day is over, that’s it, Christmas is done.  What happened to the twelve days of Christmas?  Don’t you know that taking down your tree before January 6^th is unlucky?  Mind you, Americans tend to put up their Christmas trees really rather early. 

 I remember, at my first job after coming to live in America, I claimed Boxing Day as a cultural holiday – which of course we were allowed to do at the company where I worked, so I milked that one for what it was worth.  Indeed the best thing about Christmas is Boxing Day, in my estimation.

People here often ask me about Boxing Day – what is it?  What does it mean?  Well, there are several “meanings” attached to it, but I can tell you right now, if someone tells you it’s the day when all the boxes the gifts came in are disposed of – they’re wrong. It goes back to days of yore – indeed, beyond yore!  Here are two explanations, and most people adhere to the second.

Apparently, it’s been pretty much agreed by scientists (with particular evidence offered by astronomers who know when big stars have been along to grab the attention of everyone from shepherds to kings), that Jesus was born in the month we now call September.  There was no Christmas in December.  However, throughout much of northern Europe, there was a great celebration known as Saturnalia.  People came together to light fires which they believed would strengthen the sun – it was the time of year when the sun was winter-low in the sky and only visible for a few hours each day.  They worshipped the evergreen because it remained fresh all year and never lost its leaves, a sign of everlasting life. In Britain the most revered of evergreens was the yew tree, and it was under a yew tree that those people – who were called “pagan” by early Christians – worshipped.  The feast of Saturnalia was a big event – people brought out the dried and stored fruits of summer past to feast upon, along with roasted pig and wild turkey, that sort of thing – and it was the foods stored since summer that reminded them of the abundance of the passing year as they petitioned for a good harvest in the year  ahead.  The second day of the feast of Saturnalia was a day of sports and dancing, including contact sports (such as boxing?).  It was a day of relief after all that serious stuff about the sun coming up again.

 Then along came the Christians, who were pretty savvy marketers.  They had it down long before, say, Pottery Barn, that if you want to be successful, you set up shop in the same location as the other successful shops.  So the Christians saw these people who they wanted to convert and rather than trying to draw them to another location, well, they just built their churches right next to the yew tree where everyone met to worship the natural world.  And they decided to move their celebrations too – so Christmas became late December.  Easter – my most favorite holy day – took the place of festivals to welcome the sun coming back again and the crops beginning to break through, with the egg representing new life.  The "new life" story sat well alongside the story of the Resurrection, so it was again co-opted to bring a few more converts on board.  Think of these things when you dispose of your evergreen tree, or when you go shopping for one of these in a few months time.

And if you go to any ancient church in Britain today, you will see a yew tree right next to it – they live for thousands of years, and worshippers were on the spot long before the first stone was laid to build a church.

Apart from Boxing Day being the day of contact sports and much joyous partying after lighting all those fires, there is also another meaning attached to Boxing Day.  Even when I was a kid, people referred to a seasonal gift as a “Christmas Box” – especially when that gift was a monetary offering given to another who performed a service throughout the year.  You gave a “Christmas Box” to the milkman, the postman, the coalman, to the paper boy, the chimney sweep – they all had their Christmas Box, perhaps a few pennies, or shillings pressed into a hand bearing the lines and wear of hard toil.  And it was on the day after Christmas that the lord of the manor visited his villagers, to give them a little something – a gift of coin, or food, but nothing from Harrods, though any monetary gift was in time for ye old new year sales!  It was also a day when alms boxes in the church were opened and the contents distributed to the poor and needy.  Thus, it became known as Boxing Day, but with a tipping of the hat to that day of old, when people made merry under the old yew tree, after pleading for a bit more sun.

 I remember it as the day when all the family descended upon us.  We might have had a few family members for Christmas Day, but on Boxing Day there was an onslaught of relatives – and games aplenty, descending into contact sports only when one of the cousins tried to commandeer a toy everyone else wanted to play with, then it should have been renamed “Mayhem, Blood and Tears Day.”  Or,  given the number sitting down at the dining table (in the case of the kids, at my father’s wallpapering trestles draped with sheets and spread out in the living room), it could have been, “You won’t get your dinner on a plate because we've run out of china day, but the biscuit tin lid will have to do."

 There were two highlights of the day for me.  The first was early, before the relatives came rattling down our bumpy road, at least two families to a car, with kids waving out the windows and parents tired already after the long drive from London.  I would walk up the lane to stand outside the Duke of Kent pub in our little hamlet, where the Boxing Day hunt gathered for a stirrup cup before taking off across frost-dusted fields in pursuit of the fox.  Generally, foxes are way too canny to be caught.  I don’t like fox-hunting, and I subscribe to the maxim that the hunt represents the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible – but I do love to see the Hunt in full color, strange as that might seem.  

Many of the ladies rode side-saddle, and I loved watching them in their elegant black skirts (known as “aprons”) and their little bowler hats with a veil drawn down.  I wasn’t born in the dark ages by any means, but this was the country, and those old habits – literally – died hard.

The second  highlight of the day, for me, was Boxing Day tea, when my mother set the Tunis Cake on the table, along with rich fruit Christmas Cake.  I defy anyone to actually eat Christmas cake on Christmas Day.

 Especially if you’ve already had Christmas pudding ….

 I don’t know why we had Tunis Cake on Boxing Day, but I loved it.  A Tunis Cake is basically a plain Madeira Cake – a bit like the American pound cake – covered in a thick layer of chocolate and decorated with small oranges, pears and apples made from marzipan. I love marzipan. I love it more than the cake part of Christmas cake (a rich fruit cake – remember the dried fruits brought out for the feast of Saturnalia?  Well, the ritual lingers in Yuletide cakes and puddings.  

Boxing Day was the really fun part of Christmas – there was something lighter about it.  You didn’t get gifts, but it was a whole lot of fun.  Which is why I still celebrate Boxing Day, and needless to say, for me it includes time spent with my horses ...

... and later, in the evening, maybe a glass or two of champagne in front of the fire to settle the season.  Soon enough the days will be long and the sun high in the sky once more.

Wishing you all a peaceful, prosperous and very happy new year.  May 2014 bless you in more ways than you can imagine.