Wednesday, December 26, 2007

 

HOLIDAY

It's 11am on Boxing Day, and there is nothing to be done. This is a good thing. The presents have been bought, wrapped, opened, and played with. The feast has been eaten and the kitchen is clean. We've made our family phonecalls, wined and dined our elderly neighbor, and created enough clean clothes that we can almost see the bottom of the hamper. And while no one in England can exactly tell me what Boxing Day is about (they all claim they can't remember!), my interpretation is that it is a day when you get to live "box-free" - no labels apply. You are not mommy-daddy-child-master-servant-boss-worker. You are just you. And you are free to do what you like. Nothing is open. No work can be done. You don't even have to worry about feeding yourself, because there are loads of left-overs in the fridge. All you have to do is take pleasure in the moment-to-moment experience of the day - look out the window, enjoy the crunch of pine needles underfoot, eat some Christmas pudding for breakfast, watch movies on telly, take a nap. Easy.

I used to get wiggly on days like this. I found it difficult to turn off my internal accomplishment meter and live a full day without crossing anything off my to-do list or evaluating whether I had effectively used my time. But I'm starting to understand that these rare opportunities to "unplug" are some of the greatest gifts our culture has to offer us. Of course it helps when you're living in a country where the stores are not open at 7am the day after Christmas for follow-up shopping. But even in America, where the winter holidays have evolved into a holy daze of buying and consuming, there is still the chance to come to rest, even for a moment. To embrace and embody the spirit of joyful stillness - waiting for the baby to arrive, watching a star move slowly across the sky, listening for sleigh bells on the roof, spacing out in front of the tree with your hand on the knee of someone you love.

I hope you all experience such moments of peace and stillness this week. And for those of you who are curious, see below what Wikipedia has to say about Boxing Day.

Be well.

Boxing Day is a traditional celebration, dating back to the Middle Ages, and consisted of the practice of giving out gifts to employees, the poor, or to people in a lower social class. The more common stories include:

  • It was the day when people would give a present or Christmas box to those who had worked for them throughout the year.
  • In feudal times, Christmas was a reason for a gathering of extended families. All the serfs would gather their families in the manor of their lord, which made it easier for the lord of the estate to hand out annual stipends to the serfs. After all the Christmas parties on 26 December, the lord of the estate would give practical goods such as cloth, grains, and tools to the serfs who lived on his land. Each family would get a box full of such goods the day after Christmas. Under this explanation, there was nothing voluntary about this transaction; the lord of the manor was obliged to supply these goods. Because of the boxes being given out, the day was called Boxing Day.
  • In England many years ago, it was common practice for the servants to carry boxes to their employers when they arrived for their day's work on the 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.
  • In churches, it was traditional to open the church's donation box on Christmas Day, and the money in the donation box was to be distributed to the poorer or lower class citizens on the next day. In this case, the "box" in "Boxing Day" comes from that lockbox in which the donations were left.
  • Boxing Day was the day when the wren, the king of birds,[4] was captured and put in a box and introduced to each household in the village when he would be asked for a successful year and a good harvest.
  • Because the staff had to work on such an important day as Christmas by serving the master of the house and their family, they were given the following day off. As servants were kept away from their own families to work on a traditional religious holiday and were not able to celebrate Christmas Dinner, the customary benefit was to "box" up the leftover food from Christmas Day and send it away with the servants and their families. (Similarly, as the servants had the 26th off, the owners of the manor may have had to serve themselves pre-prepared, boxed food for that one day.) Hence the "boxing" of food became "Boxing Day".

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