Today is not boxing day.Once upon a time, there was a thing called a Christmas box. A Christmas box was a box with a small hole cut in it, like a piggy bank, through which coins could be dropped. It was kept in a church and, like a piggy bank, it could not be opened, only smashed. The smashing was done at Christmas, hence the name: Christmas box.
Christmas boxes were used by servants, apprentices, bloggers and other impoverished fools to save up some money for the frosty and festive season. In gambling dens there would be a Christmas box of tips for the benefit of the butler. As one chap put it in 1634:
It is a shame, for a rich Christian to be like a Christmas boxe, that receives all, and nothing can be got out, till it be broken in peeces.
Anyway, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the idea of the Christmas box shifted. There were lots of chaps like postmen and milkmen and butchers' boys and bloggers who didn't have loose change to be stowing away all year. Yet they still felt they deserved a little something at Christmas. So generous Victorians would make a little box of presents which they would present to all the delivery boys on the first weekday after Christmas, thus insisteth the OED.
The first weekday after Christmas therefore became known as Boxing Day. And today?
Today is a Sunday.
All those pleading postmen, beggarly bloggers and other assorted lazzaroni will arrive at your door on Monday morning, their usual truculence usurped by a poor smile and rich words. As Mr Weller remarks of his son's attempt at a Valentine's card in The Pickwick Papers:
''Tain't in poetry, is it?' interposed his father.
'No, no,' replied Sam.
'Wery glad to hear it,' said Mr. Weller. 'Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin'-day, or Warren's blackin', or Rowland's oil, or some of them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.'
You have, dear poetic reader, been warned.
(A beadle, by the way, was a sort of policeman paid for by the parish).
Posts
Once again I find you pickin'
ReplyDeleteOn poets, you and Mr Dicken
And if you thus insist on needlin'
us, we'll surely fetch the Beadle in.
I’m sorry that your anger quickens
ReplyDeleteAt those disdainful lines of Dickens,
Or that Sam Weller’s stricture sickens
She who Aganippe thickens.
Though Inky Fool may try to feed all
Appetites, he needs must needle,
Like a tart and spicy cheadle*,
Laszlo Biro’s broken beadle.
(And try in foolish ink to wheedle
In a mention of Brad Friedel).
*An Anglo-Saxon term for mustard.