It is still common, particularly among older people, to dispense tips to milkmen, dustmen (garbagemen), and all those other people who suddenly become friendly and attentive during the two weeks before Christmas with the words "Here's something for your Christmas box," even though no one actually keeps such a box any longer. But no matter. The day is still celebrated, and that's the main thing.
Effectively what Boxing Day achieves nowadays is to give people a day to recover from Christmas, which is not only commendable but necessary since the British celebrate Christmas with a vigor-we might almost say an abandon-that belies their normally retiring natures. Generally speaking, you see, the British aren't much for holidays. They have no Thanksgiving or Fourth of July, no St. Patrick's Day or Labor Day. Until quite recently, they scarcely noticed New Year's Day, which didn't become an official holiday in England until about 15 years ago. What they have instead is "bank holidays," arbitrary days off scattered throughout the year (generally, it seems, on the rainiest Mondays), which are not associated with any particular event or occurrence, other than the aforementioned rain. Thus nearly all their pent-up instinct for celebrating is focused on Christmas.
It is then that they not only pull out all their decorations, give presents, sing carols, and invite around all those relatives they wouldn't normally want to see, but also drink and eat in proportions that could charitably be called grotesque.
In a country where a small glass of sherry before lunch is considered living life on the edge, this sudden outburst of hedonism is positively giddying. To visit one's normally circumspect in-laws and find the sideboard crammed with bottles of liquor of every description, the dining room table literally groaning beneath a cornucopia of meats, vegetables, mince pies, plum puddings, and other weighty delights, and every other tabletop in the house carelessly strewn with bowls and tubs of nuts, fruits, chocolate oranges, gooey dates, sticky figs, and other treats beyond counting, is to get a special insight into what makes the English tick.
I don't know what it's like in other families, but in ours Christmas starts at about five a.m. with the ritual of being awakened by a throng of overexcited offspring bouncing on one's chest and tender parts. There follows a long day spent hunting for missing tricycle parts among an ocean of shredded wrapping paper, chatting to a succession of relatives (some of whom you would swear you had never seen before), drinking to gross excess, and engaging in a vast number of inescapable rituals that range from pulling Christmas crackers (a cracker is a sort of decorated tube that is supposed to go "bang!" when pulled open, though it seldom does, and which contains a small plastic treat that you couldn't in normal circumstances give away), to setting alight the Christmas pudding and anything else in the vicinity, including your eyebrows, to watching the Queen's annual Christmas address on T.V. at 3 p.m., to passing out heavily in a chair and waking to find that it is Boxing Day and you are a day nearer to resuming normal life.
It's quite wonderful, really. But I do still wish I could find someone to wassail with.
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