December 26, 2007
Boxing
I don’t remember ever hearing of Boxing Day until a few years ago from one of my more erudite associates who is something of an Anglophiliac and knows of this Day’s British connection which I’ll get to shortly. He’s a good friend, the kind who patiently keeps me both abreast of such things and mindful of my occasional drift into liturgical disorderliness.
In most places that bother with the appropriate calendars, today is also the Feast of Stephen. Why Good King Wenceslas, as we sing, looked down upon it or upon Stephen, himself, and whether from a superior perspective or merely in disdain, I’ve never been quite sure. I’m not even sure why he was considered “good,” though I’ll bet one of our readers will know and will say so. Actually, some versions of his superior observation say that he looked “out” rather than “down,” thus suggesting even further ambiguity. Was he looking out as a matter of personal caution? Or was he looking down because he felt shy or possibly intimidated? I suppose I’ll never know without further research which I intend neither to look out for nor look down for. I might add, though, that preliminary research in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church reports that J M Neale’s Good King Wenceslas Christmas carol’s contents say “out” and are “wholly imaginary.”
Stephen was later named a saint by anybody’s measure and largely, I suppose, because he was reported to be the first Christian martyr. He was also among the first in the diaconate with its own built-in martyrdom complex from the outset, its being so ordered by the apostles just so they could begin to unload on somebody else to do the scut work (there were not yet any altar guilds or acolytes) and thus relieve subsequent bishops so they could begin to be freed up enough to claim their own version of apostolic success.
In other words, I take it there were neither Boxing Days nor Feasts of Stephen during Stephen’s time. My parents’ wedding anniversary also happened on Boxing Day day some considerable years later. Not being keepers of any churchly liturgical cycle that I know of, my beloved parents may well have never heard either of St Stephen or Boxing (in that context), an absence of venue that could, perhaps, help explain that gap in my eventual liturgical disorderliness.
Boxing Day, according to my abridged dictionary, is “the first weekday after Christmas observed as a legal holiday in parts of the British Commonwealth (sic) and marked by the giving of Christmas boxes to service workers, such as postmen.” It doesn’t mention whether the boxes were in themselves presents to be treasured or whether they also contained some sort of virtual sugar plums and the like or why postmen were singled out. (I once had a senior warden, a lawyer, who during Christmastime handed out silver dollars to cops on the beat downtown in his town. He never spoke of the practice as having anything to do with Boxing Day, only with his maintaining peace, good will, and, of course, good relations with those who enforced the very law that he lawyered.)
However one keeps it, this is a great and wondrous season, these Twelve Days that just now begin and that somehow in spite of ourselves and their own song and all we continue to maintain in our frequently down and out and quaint ways. As for Boxing and St Stephen, they’re obviously, as well, an occasion for my sudden increase in loquaciousness.
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