After a festive Christmas of building Lego (A castle was on tap this year), playing a few video games and listening to a lot of Christmas music – boxing day arrives. What is it like in the UK? I am not sure, but as with all things in Britain, it does not seem as consumer centric?

My mail slot is not littered with flyers of sales, there are not billboards everywhere and the local electronic shops are not calling me in like Future Shop is in Canada (I have already looked through their site). Check out one of the largest retailers in the UK here – note, no Boxing day signs? And the sales? £5 off here and there. Hardly a sale – where are the gate crashers?

In the end, it does not matter, as I really don’t need anything but it is odd. I do not feel assailed by the marketing engines of the local retailers and it seems odd. Maybe it is part of the culture, as there is definitely a ‘come to me, not the other way around’ mentality here (especially with customer service).

Odd. Especially since Boxing Day probably started here:

There are disparate theories as to the origins of the term. The more common stories include:

• In feudal times, Christmas was a reason for a gathering of extended families. All the serfs would gather their families in the manor of their lord, which made it easier for the lord of the estate to hand out annual stipends to the serfs. After all the Christmas parties on December 26th, the lord of the estate would give practical goods such as cloth, grains, and tools to the serfs who lived on his land. Each family would get a box full of such goods the day after Christmas. Under this explanation, there was nothing voluntary about this transaction; the lord of the manor was obliged to supply these goods. Because of the boxes being given out, the day was called Boxing Day.
• In Britain many years ago, it was common practice for the servants to carry boxes to their employers when they arrived for their day’s work on the day after Christmas. Their employers would then put coins in the boxes as special end-of-year gifts. This can be compared with the modern day concept of Christmas bonuses. The servants carried boxes for the coins, hence the name Boxing Day.
• In churches, it was traditional to open the church’s donation box on Christmas Day, and the money in the donation box was to be distributed to the poorer or lower class citizens on the next day. In this case, the "box" in "Boxing Day" comes from that one gigantic lockbox in which the donations were left. The origins of Boxing Day can be traced back to regular punch-ups caused by excessive intake of alcohol by the aristocracy. It became popular and a pastime for families with unsettled issues of wealth and status.
• Boxing Day was the day when the wren, the king of birds,[3] was captured and put in a box and introduced to each household in the village when he would be asked for a successful year and a good harvest. See Frazer’s Golden Bough.

  Because the staff had to work on such an important day as Christmas Day by serving the master of the house and their family, they were given the following day off. Since being kept away from their own families to work on a traditional religious holiday and not being able to celebrate Christmas Dinner, the customary benefit was to ‘box’ up the left over food from Christmas Day and send it away with the servants and their families. Hence the ‘boxing’ of food became ‘boxing day’.

 

Thank-you British retailers, I will keep my money. Well other than a small video card upgrade (smile).