Some old holidays were of such importance that one began
marking them a day early, on the “eve” or “even”, as is still remember in the
language in New Year’s Eve and Hallowe’en, on in Keats’s “Eve of Saint Agnes,”
when “the owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold”. The tendency to anticipate solemn or festive
days was matched by a tendency to extend them.
Thus, for much of the English-speaking world the day after Christmas is
still denominated “Boxing Day”. My
wonderful mother-in law, an English lady of the middle classes born in 1898 and
departed from us now for many years, was old enough to remember and recall for
her children the actual custom that gave “Boxing Day” its name.
Her world, though very far removed from Downton Abbey, was
nonetheless one in which domestic servants and accommodating tradespeople
loomed large. By “accommodating” I mean
that they came to you with deliveries of groceries, baked goods, dairy products,
ice, household services of many kinds.
It was an economic model in some ways being recreated by today’s
Internet, only more direct, more personal, more immediately transactional. On the day after Christmas it was customary
for such people to knock at your kitchen door in the legitimate search of a
little something, a gratuity in cash or kind.
The fellow who had been so faithful throughout long months in supplying
you with cartloads of coal could expect to find on that day a little gift box
for himself and his family. Boxing Day
was the day that such boxes were distributed.
This was all rather “feudal” from Marx’s point of view, but also
“ideal”.
“Boxing Day” now means only “the day after Christmas” in
England, and I note that the phrase has also to some degree found a home in
American English. This year, in an
entirely new way, I well and truly had a Boxing Day experience. It related less to ideal social relations
than to single-stream recycling. I have
to say, first, that we had an absolutely marvelous
Christmas holiday, as I hope was the experience of every reader of this blog. We had a completely full house—all three
children and their spouses, all six grandchildren, one attached boyfriend,
fifteen in all. And we have the
photograph to prove it. This blissful
conjunction is unlikely to occur again soon, if ever. I say this out of no valetudinarian pessimism
but in simple recognition of the dizzying dynamism of the lives of the younger
generations. Our sumptuous midday feast picked
is gastronomic path flawlessly through the cultural landscape of vegetarians,
kosher-keepers, and Irish carnivores to its triumph of unity in its mountain of
baked deserts.
Back to the boxing bit, however. As a family we like to give lots of
gifts. The general rule is one “real”
gift and several semi-facetious ones per recipient, with waived limits for
really small people, of whom there were three.
What I mean by “semi-facetious” is this.
My eldest son and I exchanged identical cans of kippered herring,
colorfully wrapped of course. Gifts of
the Magi. The anchovies and the upscale
tuna were separately packaged.
Some of our children, sensibly concluding that having their
gifts shipped to Princeton in care of the APs was better than trying to bring
them themselves in their various modes of conveyance from their various home
bases, unleashed the awesome power of Amazon.com. By the beginning of the last week before
Christmas our vestibule was stacked high and wide with Amazon cartons with
their distinctive slinky curved arrow signs and, often, their portentous blue
“Prime” tape. Then as their rightful
owners arrived just before the holiday, there were competing orgies of
repackaging the goods in what later appeared to be about 200 square yards of
decorative wrapping paper. Very shortly
thereafter, in the rampage that passes for “gift exchange” around here, the
paper was removed, often by unceremonious infantile hands. The result approximated the aftermath of a
ticker tape parade.
Our local recycling is done on a bi-weekly schedule, every
other Monday. For reasons irrelevant to
this account we missed the pickup on December 12. So there was already a detritus backlog as we
came into Christmas week. And because
Christmas fell on a Sunday, the pickup that ordinarily would have been made on
the Monday (26th), Boxing Day, has been postponed until Saturday (31st),
on which date we shall be in South Carolina.
The meaning of the misalignment of the stars is that the next recycling
date for which we shall be personally in residence is January 9th. There are certain favors I am prepared to ask
of my neighbors, but rummaging through our garbage is not one of them. So I have spent half a day compressing shards
of Christmas wrapping into Amazon shipping boxes, and breaking down little
boxes to cram into larger ones—the product of which labor to be stored tidily
somewhere in the house until dawn on January
9th. On this Boxing
Day there is no room in the manger.
