Something called ‘Boxing Day’ shows up on calendars on December 26, the day after Christmas. I have never known what it actually is.
If it had something to do with the sport, there would be at least a paragraph or two somewhere in the sports section of the newspaper.
It seemed like it could be that in some places the Christmas decorations are all taken down and put in boxes on that day. That analysis appears to be incorrect. It certainly doesn’t work that way around here.
The Wikipedia article probably has more information than you want to know.
In the Australian tradition Boxing Day is a secular public holiday. Being summer, most people plan on doing absolutely nothing, to recover from the previous day of having to do a lot of Christmas cooking and socialising with relatives. Therefore it consists of eating Christmas meal leftovers, whingeing about what relatives said, comparing notes about presents, watching some of the major sport [Boxing Day is the start of the Sydney to Hobart ocean yacht race, and the Boxing Day cricket test between Australia and whoever] or the Boxing Day sales. Lots of people go to the beach or for a picnic or a walk - ultra-high temps, bushfires, cyclones, floods permitting.
The Boxing Day sales were seen as the major annual retail sales but have been undercut by the Black Friday sales in recent years. Here in the Workers paradise, those who are unfortunate enough to have to work on Boxing Day are paid penalty rates - usually double pay as its a public holiday.
Normally as well, the Prime Minister usually takes a Christmas break and passes the baton to the Deputy PM, who is also on leave, although checking in. Newspapers would regularly run a pic of the acting PM camping or slothing on a hammock
In Germany, Dec 26 is not known as “Boxing Day”, but simply as second day of Christmas. It’s a public holiday just like the 25th.
I just read the Wikipedia article and I’m genuinely surprised. I thought it was called that because it’s the day people put certain gifts back in a box to return or exchange, like clothes that are the wrong size and such.
It’s my favorite holiday! What did you get your servants this year?
I don’t know how Americans get through Christmas without it!
Since Christmas and Boxing Day are stat holidays, if either falls on a Sunday or Saturday, we get time off the next week. It means we always get a four-day holiday, except when Christmas falls on Tuesday or Wednesday.
In the Junior League it was a day for filling boxes with small gifts and pantry items to deliver in poor neighborhoods. We did hundreds of them every year.
Many people take the entire week between Christmas and New Year off. We take vacation for any day that is not a holiday. Many companies just shut down for the period.
Very common in the white-collar fields where I’ve worked (marketing and advertising).
In my 36 years of working full-time, I can count on one hand the number of times I actually had to work at any point between December 24th and January 1st. In probably 15 of those 35 years, the companies where I worked were fully closed in between Christmas and New Year’s; the rest of the time, virtually everyone was taking time off (including the clients), and so, if anyone was going in to work, there was very little actual work going on.
In my years in advertising, agency management always stressed that the account teams needed to make sure that there was coverage in case of a client emergency, but in 20+ years of agency life, I’ve never had to respond to any such emergency.
I worked in factories doing volume manufacturing. If you didn’t make your quarterly numbers, you were working that last week