Boxing Day—Bonus Brit Holiday

Despite intense advertising and social pressure, not everyone goes shopping on Boxing Day, many simply recover from Chrismas revelry which will make Americans who have to rush back to work intensly jealous.

The Brits and the residents of other former pink blotches on Queen Victoria’s globe like many Americans will spend today storming the malls and shops on what is usually the busiest retail day of the year.  Disgruntled gift recipients hit the refund and exchange desks and spend the gift cards and even old fashion cash that.   But unlike most Yanks they will be doing it on an official National Holiday as a paid day off.  Officially December 26 is just another Bank Holiday.  But Boxing Day is a treasured tradition with long and deep roots.

The celebration in the British Isles owes its origins to the aristocracy, gentry, and wealthy townsmen and their households.  The master would give presents to his servants and staff, who would also have the day off work.  Sometimes the master’s family would even serve meals to their inferiors!  Needless to say, this custom was very popular among the servants, and sometimes observed resentfully by those unaccustomed to either manual labor or generosity.

Regency Boxing Day--A Gentleman and Lady are kind to repectable children.  A Goodwife may have a penny for the watchman.  If he is lucky the urchin sweeping snow in his bare legs might even get a handful of nuts

It is also a remnant of an ancient tradition that may—or may not—go back to the Roman celebrations of Saturnalia and Sol Invictus, when there was a carnival-like turn around with slaves lording over masters for a day.  The tradition continued into the Middle Ages on into Elizabethan times, where it took on the wild excesses of street revelry.

That revelry doomed the whole season when Oliver Cromwell and his Puritans took over.  Eventually, Boxing Day restored a controlled dollop of the old festival.  The Church of England gave a religious cover to the day as St. Stephen’s Day. 

Stephen was the Deacon of Jerusalem the earliest days of Christianity known for his charities to the poor.  He was also the first Christian martyr, stoned to death for allegedly preaching the Trinity in the Temple.

The familiar carol Good King Wenceslas is a St. Stephen’s Day song meant for street begging.  In Ireland, the day is still officially called St. Stephen’s Day.

Wren Boys in Dublin, 1933.

It is also known there as Wren’s Day.  Boys in homemade hats and costumes carry a caged wren—or sometime a dead one pierced by a holly sprig—proclaiming it the king of the birds and begging for treats.  Once a fading country custom, in the cities men now re-enact it—often on a pub crawl.

In the Bank Holidays Act of 1871, Parliament recognized Boxing Day as a Bank Holiday—an officially recognized public holiday.  While time off from work was not originally mandatory, but has become nearly universal.

The holiday spread across the Empire and is still official in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other Commonwealth countries.  In South Africa it was re-named The Day of Goodwill in 1994.

Today small gifts are still given trades people and service workers, but in Britain the day has become all about shopping.  It is the biggest shopping day of the year and has been compared to American Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.  Stores mark the day with huge sales.

A Boxing Day Hunt sans fox.  The toffs say the are persecuted and misunderstood.  Poor babies

It is also a day of sport.  Football—that’s soccer to Americans—and Rugby leagues hold full schedules of games, teams usually playing their most serious rivals.  There are also prestige horse races and the country gentry mount fox hunts—these days due to a bitterly resented law, sans fox.  The toffs are no longer allowed to chase real fox, but still get to ride to the hounds chasing a scented bait.

So for my friends across the Pond and around the world who celebrate, happy Boxing Day! 

For a Good Time Call Saturnalia the Roman Solstice Romp

Saternalia--everyone is having a great time in Italian sculptor Ernesto Biondo's 1900 monument.

Saturnalia was the Roman feast of Saturn, the god of Harvest, a dies festus, a legal holiday when no public business could be conducted.  It was first celebrated on this date—accounting for a couple of changes of calendars—in 496 BC.  At various points during the Republic and Empire festivities extended over seven, three, and finally five days.

For a long time, all I knew about Saturnalia was that when I was in Cheyenne East High School the Latin Club nerds plastered the school with posters reading Io Saturnalia! Which roughly translated to “way to go, big fella!” or something.  They also had a slave auction fundraiser in the lunch room where leering gym teachers bought the comeliest girls and likeliest boys draped in their mothers’ bed sheets.  Kind of creepy, when you think about it.

But as a student of all things religious, I have since learned a thing or two about it.

As gods go Saturn could be a mean dude as depicted in this 1637 portrait by Peter Paul Rubens.

Saturnalia is just one of the many festivals common in Europe and elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere around the period of the solstice.  Unlike others, it is a harvest festival, which seems strange until you remember that Rome not only had a pleasant Mediterranean climate but was in a period of historic warming prior the Little Ice Age, the onset of which helped plunge the continent into the Dark Ages.  But that’s another story.

The public ritual of the holiday was observed at the Temple of Saturn, one of the most important buildings in the Forum.  A lectisternium, a ceremonial couch, was set up before the Temple and the statue of Saturn was unbound—The rest of the year he was tied up because of his unfortunate habit of eating people.  He was depicted as a semi-depraved old man caring a harvesting scythe.  Christians would later adapt that image to the Father Time image associated with the celebration of the New Year.   A feast was laid out for the god before the couch so that he wouldn’t get hungry and revert to his nasty cannibalism.

In time the festival incorporated many of the aspects of the Greek festival of Dionysus or Baccus as he was known in Rome.

The public ritual and spectacle aside what made Saturnalia especially popular with Roman plebeians and the large population of slaves were the carnival-like traditions.  Customs from the earlier Greek festival of Dionysus—Bacchus—were incorporated into the celebrations.

 Social norms of the rest of the year were set aside.  Private parties and public revelry were the order of the day.  Restrictions on gambling were loosened and even slaves could try their luck at games, many trying to win enough money to buy their freedom.   Exchanging small gifts—saturnalia et sigillaricia—either made by hand or purchased at special holiday markets was a highlight.  Slaves were exempted from punishment by their masters, in theory at least.

Gambling is an important part of the revelry and slaves were allowed to participate.  For them the stakes could be very high indeed--many hoped to win the small fortunes needed to buy their freedom.  This common dice game was depicted on the walls of a wealthy villa in Pompeii.

The most telling was the turn-about feature of the celebration.  Slaves and common laborers were supposed to be served feasts by their masters and were free to express disrespect.  Sometimes complete role reversal was practiced.

With the rules of public decorum suspended, it was a very good time for wine merchants and public drunkenness was common.  So were sexual hi-jinks, including usually forbidden mixing among classes, master and slave.

After 250 AD Saturnalia was subsumed into the new Festival of Sttol Invictus decreed by Emperor Aurelian in celebrations of a Sun clut.  The return of the sun on December 25 was a high point of the multi day rcelebration.  Although the original Saturnalia ended before that date a confusion about the two Roman holidays led to the popular misconception that the early Church "stole" December 25 for it celebration of the birth of Christ.

Around 250 AD Emperor Aurelian created the new official cult of Sol Invictus, a Sun deity which may have borrowed from the Persian warrior cult of Mithra, which celebrated the return of the Sun on December 25, just after the conclusion of Saturnalia.

This led to the often told tale is that the early Christians, still persecuted, hid their celebration of the Feast of the Nativity during Saturnalia to avoid detection.  The trouble was that the date for that celebration was not yet fixed.  In fact it was often celebrated in the Spring—the lambing season when shepherds would have been in the fields on the lookout for wolves. Even when Christmas was settled on December 25, it was two days after the customary end of Saturnalia but did coincide with the feast of Sol Invictus.  However later Emperors began to suppress the Sun festival with the rise of Christianity, around 390 AD.  The first written reference to a festival of Natalis Invicti was the Philocalian calendar of  354.  But a spring celebration of the nativity persisted more generally for another 100 years by which time the festival of Sol Invictus was banned and reduced to a rural folk celebration.   

The early church did seem to want to mount a feast or festival that competed with the various pagan solstice festivals and to which locals could adapt some of their beloved customs.  At the same time, the Church went through periods of vigorously trying to stamp out vestiges of those same pagan festivals.  For this reason the exchange of gifts was outlawed through much of the early Middle Ages.

But customs did persist.  Although most of the trapping of Christmas were borrowed from the Nordic Yule, Celtic, and Druidic customs, the cultural influence of Rome’s long occupation of Britain can be seen in the carnival like observation of Christmas there up to the Puritan era   which included the same role-reversals, public revelry, and drinking.  The vestiges of it can be seen in Boxing Day, when masters give presents to servants and often serve them meals on the day after Christmas.