# What is Boxing day?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [December 27, 2025, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108 "2025-12-27T21:39:31Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Ancient\_Nerd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ancient_Nerd)
#### Post date: [December 27, 2025, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/1 "2025-12-27T21:39:31Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)
#### Post date: [December 27, 2025, 9:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/2 "2025-12-27T21:49:31Z")
The Wikipedia article probably has more information than you want to know.
> **[Boxing Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_Day)**
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> This is an accepted version of this page
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>
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> Boxing Day, also known as Offering Day, is a holiday celebrated on 26 December, the day after Christmas Day. Boxing Day was once a day to donate gifts to those in need, but it has evolved to become a part of Christmas festivities. It originated in the United Kingdom and is celebrated in several Commonwealth nations. The attached bank holiday or public holiday may take place on 27 or 28 December if necessary to ensure it falls on a weekday. Boxing Day ...
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### Author:  [@Banksiaman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Banksiaman)
#### Post date: [December 27, 2025, 11:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/3 "2025-12-27T23:16:37Z")
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
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### Author:  [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)
#### Post date: [December 27, 2025, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/4 "2025-12-27T23:22:30Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@FlikTheBlue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FlikTheBlue)
#### Post date: [December 28, 2025, 12:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/5 "2025-12-28T00:34:58Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@Moriarty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moriarty)
#### Post date: [December 28, 2025, 1:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/6 "2025-12-28T01:31:48Z")
It’s my favorite holiday! What did you get your servants this year?
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### Author:  [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)
#### Post date: [December 28, 2025, 2:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/7 "2025-12-28T02:52:15Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@TruCelt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TruCelt)
#### Post date: [December 28, 2025, 3:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/8 "2025-12-28T03:37:33Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@Ancient\_Nerd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ancient_Nerd)
#### Post date: [December 28, 2025, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/9 "2025-12-28T04:49:06Z")
> [@Northern\_Piper](#):
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> I don’t know how Americans get through Christmas without it!
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.
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### Author:  [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)
#### Post date: [December 28, 2025, 4:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/10 "2025-12-28T04:58:50Z")
> [@Ancient\_Nerd](#):
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> Many people take the entire week between Christmas and New Year off.
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.
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### Author:  [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)
#### Post date: [December 28, 2025, 5:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/11 "2025-12-28T05:30:13Z")
I worked in factories doing volume manufacturing. If you didn’t make your quarterly numbers, you were working that last week
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### Author:  [@susan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/susan)
#### Post date: [December 28, 2025, 6:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/12 "2025-12-28T06:35:39Z")
Hospitals don’t close (but 3 days of overtime pay wasn’t bad).
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### Author:  [@Banksiaman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Banksiaman)
#### Post date: [December 28, 2025, 7:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/13 "2025-12-28T07:35:01Z")
Because the Christmas-Boxing Day-New Years break coincides with school holidays, the emerging practice has been to turn it into a solid 2 week shutdown in construction and industry. The effect of this has been to to stabilise intermittent and uneven servicing across industry partners, and to force workers to chew up some of their accumulated leave. Important and urgent work, projects requiring rail and road possessions while its quiet, and emergency works continue unaffected but its increasingly difficult to hope to catch up on your work in a dead-quiet office, and then take a longer break at, say, Easter.
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### Author:  [@Schnitte](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Schnitte)
#### Post date: [December 28, 2025, 8:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/14 "2025-12-28T08:58:18Z")
> [@EinsteinsHund](#):
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> 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.
Occasionally it’s also still known under its traditional name, St Stephen’s Day, which is the Saint associated with the day in the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church. But yes, in secular terms the usual term is “second day of Christmas”.
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### Author:  [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)
#### Post date: [December 28, 2025, 9:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/15 "2025-12-28T09:53:07Z")
I thought it was the day to box up any unwanted Christmas presents and regift them to the servants or someone. But occasionally it’s celebrated with a massive earthquake and tsunami.
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### Author:  [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)
#### Post date: [December 28, 2025, 10:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/16 "2025-12-28T10:44:02Z")
> [@Schnitte](#):
>
> “second day of Christmas”
The long name is **[zweiter Weihnachtsfeiertag](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zweiter_Weihnachtsfeiertag)** which could be translated as second day of the Christmas holiday or celebration, depending, I guess, on what you want to stress. Holiday is more secular, celebration could be liturgical.
In Spain it is different by region or Comunidad Autónoma. In Catalonia and the Balearic Islands it is celebrated as Sant Esteban and it is not a working day, in the rest of Spain it is a normal working day.
The name Boxing Day had me puzzled when learning English in school. Outside Catalonia and the Balearic Islands the day has no name that I knew of, so how do you translate it?
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### Author:  [@Schnitte](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Schnitte)
#### Post date: [December 28, 2025, 11:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/17 "2025-12-28T11:46:50Z")
> [@Pardel-Lux](#):
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> Outside Catalonia and the Balearic Islands the day has no name that I knew of
As I mentioned above, it is liturgically the feast of St Stephen in the Catholic and Anglican churches (hence your Esteban), and my impression is that there is still a widespread awareness of this in many countries. It’s mentioned as such, for instance, in the traditional English Christmas carol “Good King Wenceslas” (“…looked out on the feast of Stephen”).
(Of course, almost every day of the year is the feast of some saint or another for Catholics. But Stephen is one of the more prominent ones, where the association between day and saint is still rather strong. Another obvious example, at least for Germans, is, of course, St Sylvester on 31 December, and New Year’s Eve is still generally known under the name of that saint in Germany.)
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### Author:  [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)
#### Post date: [December 28, 2025, 12:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/18 "2025-12-28T12:00:53Z")
Yes, I know that now, but I was not aware of it then. And while it is true that each and every day of the year has a Catholic Saint who is celebrated on that day (usually more than one, there are more saints than days in the year in Catholic lore), the day Saint Stephen or Esteban, that is, the day the people called Esteban celebrated their “name day” (_su santo_, in Spanish, for kids another day to get gifts - not so important as the birthday, but still something), was celebrated on another day of the year in my memory. There is more than one Saint Stephen, probably, so people called Stephen have to choose with one they celebrate as “theirs”.
By the way, Saint Stephen is officially the patron saint of deacons, stonemasons, headaches and those who suffer from them.
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### Author:  [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)
#### Post date: [December 28, 2025, 12:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/19 "2025-12-28T12:06:50Z")
Retailers routinely accepting returns, and receivers of gifts regarding it as normal to reject gifts ands return them to store, are both late 20th century phenomena.
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### Author:  [@Schnitte](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Schnitte)
#### Post date: [December 28, 2025, 12:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-boxing-day/1026108/20 "2025-12-28T12:32:24Z")
> [@Pardel-Lux](#):
>
> There is more than one Saint Stephen, probably, so people called Stephen have to choose with one they celebrate as “theirs”.
The other major Stephen is Stephen of Hungary, whose feast used to be on 2 September but was moved to 16 August in the 1960s. (Yes, the popes reserve the right to tinker with the calendar of saints. There is also a detailed and complex ranking system in the Catholic Church that puts feasts into different classes and determines what happens if several of them happen to fall on the same day in a given year. Liturgical calendars are a serious matter for the Vatican.)
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