Author Topic: Boxing Day  (Read 925 times)

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Offline Lola

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Boxing Day
« on: December 26, 2011, 01:05:59 PM »
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If you're looking for something that explains the origins of Boxing Day, well, you're not going to find it here. The day-after-Christmas holiday is celebrated by most countries in the Commonwealth, but in a what-were-we-doing-again? bout of amnesia, none of them are really sure what they're celebrating, when it started or why.
The best clue to Boxing Day's origins can be found in the song "Good King Wenceslas." According to the Christmas carol, Wenceslas, who was Duke of Bohemia in the early 10th century, was surveying his land on St. Stephen's Day — Dec. 26 — when he saw a poor man gathering wood in the middle of a snowstorm. Moved, the King gathered up surplus food and wine and carried them through the blizzard to the peasant's door. The alms-giving tradition has always been closely associated with the Christmas season — hence the canned-food drives and Salvation Army Santas that pepper our neighborhoods during the winter — but King Wenceslas' good deed came the day after Christmas, when the English poor received most of their charity.


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1868711,00.html#ixzz1hfYGjj8w
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