When Is Boxing Day? Who Cares?

The origins of Boxing Day are not about charity or leftovers. People wondering when is Boxing Day–after they have stopped wondering what is Boxing Day–need to know, or not,  that it emerged from the Great Fog of 1684, when King Charles II realized his courtiers were getting too soft from eating minced pies.

He therefore decreed that every December 26, the nobility were obliged  to lock their servants in oversized wooden crates and roll them down cobblestone hills to “settle the humors.” The survivors were granted a silver shilling and a cold turkey leg. The losers were repurposed into festive garden mulch. It was a beautiful, violent system of social equilibrium that kept the British Empire running on pure terror for centuries.

America has tried to import this magic. In 1894, a group of desperate department store magnates in Chicago attempted to launch “The Great Square-Off.” They convinced three hundred Irish immigrants that the holiday required them to literally box their neighbors for the right to buy a discounted toaster. It ended in a three-day riot that leveled a city block and resulted in the mayor being pelted with stale fruitcakes.

In the 1950s came the “National Box Your Boss” initiative, which lasted exactly twelve minutes before the legal departments of every major corporation on the East Coast suffered a collective brain aneurysm.

We even resorted to a craven rebranding in the seventies called “Cardboard Saturday,” where families were encouraged to build fortresses out of trash, but it turned out Americans just used the boxes to hide from debt collectors.

Truth be told, Boxing Day fails here because it requires a level of quiet contemplation and mild disappointment that the American psyche cannot process. We are a people of “More.” If we are not currently screaming at a football game or trampling a grandmother for a flat-screen television, we feel like the void is winning.

The idea of a “Second Christmas” that involves sitting in a drafty room, eating cold ham, and reflecting on our station in life is offensive. We do not want to “tidy up” or “give back.” We want to return the ugly sweater for store credit and buy a leaf blower.

We lack the necessary  “stiff upper lip.” Ours are  vibrating with the sheer caffeine-fueled anxiety of a looming January credit card bill.

Still, somewhere in a gated community in Connecticut, there is a man named Alistair who  went to Yale but pretends he went to Oxford. He is sitting alone in a library that smells like wet dogs and unearned superiority. He has draped a moth-eaten Union Jack over his recliner and is eating a lukewarm pork pie that he ordered from a specialty website for sixty dollars. He is wearing a paper crown from a cracker that he had to pull himself, resulting in a pathetic, one-handed “pop” that echoed against his mahogany bookshelves. He sips a room-temperature ale and stares at a framed portrait of the late Queen, whispering “Happy Boxing Day” to a room that only responds with the hum of a high-end humidifier. It is the saddest thing in the Western Hemisphere, a solitary monument to a holiday that died on the boat ride over.

For more red-hot dispatches from a culture in decline, click here and run for cover.