Boxing Day: Humans Are The Only Creatures That Appreciate Irony. Surely Thoust Jiveth !!!

The day-after-Christmas holiday is celebrated by most countries in the Commonwealth, but in a 'what-were-we-doing-again' bout of amnesia, none of them are really sure what they're celebrating, when it started or why.

The best clue to Boxing Day's origins can be found in the song "Good King Wenceslas." According to the Christmas carol, Wenceslas, who was Duke of Bohemia in the early 10th century, was surveying his land on St. Stephen's Day — Dec. 26 — when he saw a poor man gathering wood in the middle of a snowstorm. Moved, the King gathered up surplus food and wine and carried them through the blizzard to the peasant's door. The alms-giving tradition has always been closely associated with the Christmas season — hence the canned-food drives and Salvation Army Santas that pepper our neighborhoods during the winter — but King Wenceslas' good deed came the day after Christmas, when the English poor received most of their charity.

King Wenceslas didn't start Boxing Day, but the Church of England might have. During Advent, Anglican parishes displayed a box into which churchgoers put their monetary donations. On the day after Christmas, the boxes were broken open and their contents distributed among the poor, thus giving rise to the term Boxing Day ...
(Maybe)

But wait: there's another possible story about the holiday's origin. The day after Christmas was also the traditional day on which the aristocracy distributed presents (boxes) to servants and employees — a sort of institutionalized Christmas-bonus party. The servants returned home, opened their boxes and had a second Christmas on what became known as Boxing Day.

From this also came the term Christmas Box: the container where people placed gifts whether it was for the needy or from employer to employee ...


So which version is correct? Well, both. Or neither. No one, it seems, is really sure. Both the church boxes and the servant presents definitely existed, although historians disagree on which practice inspired the holiday.

Boxing Day's origins aren't especially important to modern-day folk. Few people can afford to have servants anymore and the religious significance has been lost by many.
Today's Boxing Day festivities have very little to do with charity. Instead, they revolve around shopping, food, football (soccer), visits from friends, food and drinking at pubs and/or the nearest watering hole.