All Boxed In
Today is Boxing Day. The holiday’s roots can be traced to Britain. In New Zealand Boxing Day is the day after Christmas Day, 26 December, a public holiday. In other parts of the world it’s also known as St Stephen’s Day. St. Stephen was one of the seven original deacons of the Christian Church who were ordained by the Apostles to care for widows and the poor.
As he died, he begged God not to punish his killers. The book of Acts tells the story of how Stephen was tried by the Sanhedrin for blasphemy against Moses and God (Acts 6:11) and speaking against the Temple and the Law (Acts 6:13-14) and was then stoned to death (c. A.D. 34–35) by an infuriated mob encouraged by Saul of Tarsus, the future Saint Paul.
The name ‘Boxing Day’ goes back to medieval times, more than 800 years ago but the exact origin is unknown. The holiday may date from the Middle Ages, It may have begun with the Lords and ladies of England who presented Christmas gifts in boxes to their servants on December 26. Or it may have begun with priests, who opened the church’s alms boxes on the day after Christmas and distributed the contents to the poor. Or even in England in the middle of the nineteenth century under Queen Victoria.
Although there is general agreement that the holiday is of British origin and it has to do with giving presents to the less fortunate, there is still dispute as to how the name came about. At various times, the following ‘origins’ have been asserted as the correct one. It’s said that ordinary members of the merchant class gave boxes of food and fruit to tradespeople and servants the day after Christmas in an ancient form of Yuletide tip. These gifts were an expression of gratitude to those who worked for them, in much the same way that one now tips. Those long-ago gifts were done up in boxes, hence the day coming to be known as “Boxing Day.”
Christmas celebrations in the old days entailed bringing everyone together from all over a large estate, thus creating one of the rare instances when everyone could be found in one place at one time. This gathering of his extended family, so to speak, presented the lord of the manor with a ready-made opportunity to easily hand out that year’s stipend of necessities. Thus, the day after Christmas, serfs (a person who was bound to the land and owned by the feudal lord) were presented with their annual allotment of practical goods. Who got what was determined by the status of the worker and his relative family size, with spun cloth, leather goods, durable food supplies, tools being handed out.
Under this explanation, there was nothing voluntary about this transaction; the Lord of the manor was obligated to supply these goods. The items were put into boxes, one box for each family, to make carrying away the results of this annual restocking easier; thus, the day came to be known as “Boxing Day.”
Many years ago, on the day after Christmas, servants in Britain carried boxes to their masters when they arrived for the day’s work. It was a tradition that on this day all employers would put coins in the boxes, as a special end-of-the-year gift. In a closely-related version of this explanation, apprentices and servants would on that day get to smash open small earthenware boxes left for them by their masters. These boxes would house small sums of money specifically left for them.
This dual-versioned theory melds the two previous ones together into a new form; namely, the employer who was obligated to hand out something on Boxing Day, but this time to recipients who were not working the land for him and thus were not dependent on him for all they wore and ate. The “box” thus becomes something beyond ordinary compensation (in a way goods to landed serfs was not), yet it’s also not a gift in that there’s nothing voluntary about it. Under this theory, the boxes are an early form of Christmas bonus, something employees saw as their entitlement.
Boxes in churches for seasonal donations to the needy were opened on Christmas Day, and the contents distributed by the clergy the following day. The contents of this alms box originated with the ordinary folks in the parish who were thus under no direct obligation to provide anything at all and were certainly not tied to the recipients by a employer/employee relationship. In this case, the “box” in “Boxing Day” comes from that one gigantic lockbox the donations were left in.
Whichever version one chooses to go with, the one thread common to all is the theme of one-way provision to those not in the same social circles. As mentioned previously, equals exchanged gifts on Christmas Day or before, but tradespeople, employees, servants, those on the land or the poor received their “boxes” on the day after. It should be noted that the socially well off did not receive anything back from those they played Lord Bountiful to since a gift in return would have been seen as a presumptuous act of laying claim to equality, the very thing Boxing Day was an entrenched bastion against. Boxing Day in this context appeared to preserve class status. That was then. Boxing Day in New Zealand is a much more laid back affair. More leisurely these days. I like this version the best!
