To wrap up (pun intended) our festive series, Jacqui Turner traces the history of Boxing Day in Britain.

Boxing day: absolutely nothing to do with boxes today, but in our house lots to do with football and Paul Hollywood’s ‘Hand-Raised Boxing Day Pie’ (in the traditional tin) if anyone feels motivated to risk a ‘soggy bottom’.

For my poor sister, who worked in fashion and retail, it has never been much of the vaunted ‘public holiday’ that may of us take for granted, as Boxing Day turned into the start of the January sales. In 2016, a petition was launched to maintain the tradition of keeping stores closed on Boxing Day, largely supported by the public. Nonetheless, it failed in the face of post-Christmas profits. For others more adventurous than us there is the ‘Boxing Day Dip’ in a freezing cold sea, though thankfully the traditional Boxing Day fox hunt has been banned. But where do these traditions originate?

Boxing Day traditions differ throughout the world, but I would not presume to discuss those here and instead refer you to my learned colleagues who can provide a non-Christian and a non-Western context for 26^th December. But Boxing Day is widely recognised among communities across the globe. While it is not routinely celebrated in the US (many return to work immediately after Christmas), it is observed across numerous countries, often associated with the Commonwealth and beyond, including Canada, Australia, Nigeria, Trinidad and Tobago; in South Africa, it is the ‘Day of Goodwill’ and synonymous with sport.

Our medievalist colleagues would quite rightly point out that Boxing Day was originally the day of St Stephen, the first Christian martyr, stoned to death c34 AD. It has since been associated with Christianity and the dispensing of alms the day after Christmas Day, and it is here that the charitable association with Boxing Day started.  Indeed, we still hear carols celebrating Good King Wencelas’ good deeds which were always ‘on the Feast of Stephen’. For wine lovers, tradition also warns that if the snow does lay ‘round about deep and crisp and even’ or ‘if wind blows much on St. Stephen’s Day, the grape will be bad in the next year.’

However, the name Boxing Day derived from the practice of the giving of gifts to the poor by the better off. It was also traditionally a day off work for servants, who often received a special ‘box’ from their masters or employers. One of the first direct references to this practice on Boxing Day can be recognised in Samuel Pepys diary of 1633, where he wrote that he had send a message by coach to his shoemaker with ‘something to the boys’ box against Christmas’.

Our modern Boxing Day, like so many British Christmas traditions, evolved under Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and is largely German in origin.  Before the Victorian period, Christmas lacked the sentiment associated with modern Christmases.  The 25^th and 26^th December were most often working days like any other, but industrialisation brought with it the growth of a newly prosperous middle class who increasingly had the means to take time to celebrate and demonstrate their philanthropic credentials over Christmas Day and Boxing Day.  Boxing Day was traditionally concerned with the distribution of wealth to the poor that had been collected from churchgoers, and remained the day that servants and working people opened parcels or boxes containing money that had been given by the ‘rich folk’ – although for female servants, accepting a few extra pennies was not without its perils!

Aristocratic sports were also associated with Boxing Day, including the traditional foxhunting meet, which was effectively banned in England and Wales in 2005. Horseracing and shooting continue.

However, by the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, as a result of increasing urbanisation and the growth of the working class, Boxing Day became associated with newly-emerging professional football. Associations of football with December 26th were not entirely new, however: Boxing Day had also played a part in the ‘Christmas Truce’ on the Western Front in 1914. While some of the British Expeditionary Force and some German Troops met in no man’s land on Christmas Eve to play football, the truce lasted only until Boxing Day.

In modern Britain, this sporting connection is of huge import: Boxing Day became a bank holiday in 1974 partly because so many people took time off for football matches anyway! Enjoy your December 26th this year, however you choose to spend it.

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I thought I’d leave you with a poem from our friends at the Mills Archive.

The Winter Woods: Boxing Day in Milling, 28 Dec 1895.

Those woodlands in winter I cannot forget;
How long on that snow I could softly have lain;
Or dreamed on those mosses, so mellow and wet,
While winds moaned around like some wood nymph in pain.

And here did I rest on a boulder alone,
Though not quite alone, as I afterwards knew;
There were dear little centipeds under the stone,
And sweet little earwigs secreted from view.

Those leaves, dank and withered, that once had been young;
What moral was theirs for a beautiful text;
Their time had arrived to be trampled as dung,
A cheerful remainder that mine might be next.

A thrush, that the frost had made reckless and bold,
Was carving a snail, with his beak for a knife;
While a robin, with plumage puffed out for the cold,
Engaged with a maggot, was tugging for life.

Some hips, out of reach of the schoolboy, o’erhead
The famishing birds had already begun;
‘Twas food some could tackle, while others lay dead;
But – Nature’s last hope – it was better than none.

The mill dam below had a deep frozen crust,
The ice stopped our wheel, and the sluices were stuck:
The miller, a testy old son of the dust,
I could hear in the distance was blessing his luck!

The snow under foot and the aspect around
Had happy suggestions of ruin and wreck;
I pondered my path – there was need on such ground –
With drip from the trees coming fresh down my neck.

Yet, give me such peaceful seclusion, I cried:
It’s balm to the brain and it’s rest for the limb –
Just then on some fungus I managed to slide,
And – crash! through the briars – sat down with a “vim”!

Ye men of a thousand necessities here
The change can be felt to excite you afresh;
I shall feel it myself for the rest of the year,
That blow from the ground and those thorns in the flesh.

That hour in the woods of the winter has sped;
But winds chilled my bones and my boot sprung a leak;
And here am I, blowing a cold in my head
And likely to keep to my chambers a week.

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