For about thirty years of my career, my Christmas was dominated by the Boxing Day Sales, not that I can ever remember going shopping on Boxing Day. For the first ten years of my working life, I worked in the wholesale trade, selling children’s clothing to retailers, ranging from small shops to department stores and having just spent August, September, and October dispatching orders for the Christmas trade around the country, we then spent November and early December running down our stock at rock bottom prices for the Boxing Day sales. Latterly, I worked for a menswear retailer in their distribution centre and I have been known on more than one occasion to have filled up a hire van and taken my two daughters with me as we travelled around the north of England delivering stock, because every van and car in the company was committed to getting stock and point of sale advertising into the shops ready for the Boxing Day Sales. I always had a fantasy of walking along the promenade at the seaside and blowing off the cobwebs, but was normally far too tired to be bothered and spent my time watching TV and overindulging in food. My pastime with young children became building up the toys they had received at Christmas and I confess that maybe I got at least as much fun out of building them up and they ever did playing with them.
I have become intrigued this year by the history of Christmas, chiefly because I keep hearing people talking about “traditional Christmas” and I wonder exactly what is traditional and how long some of our traditions go back in time. So, as I write this thought for Boxing Day, I wonder where “Boxing Day” comes from. We can pretty well forget the first thousand years of the common era, because nothing seems to be recorded about Christmas prior to 1038. We know that the Medieval people took Christmas pretty seriously and celebrations ran for the full twelve days with the exchanging of presents on twelfth night. Christmas was banned in the seventeenth century and for two hundred years was outlawed in this country, until Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843 and most of our current Christmas customs have grown up from there.
But what about Boxing Day? Looking back to Medieval times, wealthier people gathered to worship God on Christmas Day and would bring gifts of money or food for the poor in society and would then distribute boxes of food on the Feast of Stephen, the day after Christmas Day. There was a folk story about St Wenceslas a tenth century Duke in Bohemia, who went out on the Feast of Stephen, trudging through the snow to take aid to a poor man, he had seen. Hymn writer John Mason Neale only penned the words of the hymn “Good King Wenceslas” in 1853 as the Victorian or Dickensian Christmas took hold.
It strikes me that at Christmas 2021, our supermarkets have been encouraging shoppers to give generously to food banks, Churches have had special collections during services to raise money to provide food for those who might otherwise be forced to go without. It saddens me that in the first quarter of the twenty first century, we see the start contrast between sales, when people are trying to grab as much for themselves as they can, yet at the same time, we have people living in poverty. That said, it does my heart good to see that thousand-year-old tradition of looking out, see somebody in need, and setting out, often at great cost to self, to minister to their needs. I like to believe that in seeing this, we catch a glimpse of “Traditional Christmas”
Find a few moments to stop, be quiet and think for a moment or two.