Being quite proud of my English heritage and my Welsh DNA (as determined by ancestry.com), I thought I’d take some time this afternoon to explain Boxing Day. Today is also the first day of Hanukkah and the first day of Kwanzaa; coming from neither of those cultures or traditions, I’ll leave them to someone else’s exposition. As for English Boxing Day, yes, it is a real holiday, day off from work, schools closed, and so on, observed in the United Kingdom, throughout the commonwealth countries, and some of the former colonies (excluding the US!). It is celebrated on December 26th, and if that date falls on a weekend, Boxing Day is observed on the following Monday. It is not, as I have heard some suggest, when you throw out all the boxes your presents came in on Christmas!
A traditional Boxing Day meal in the UK would include Bubble and Squeak, fried leftover potatoes and greens from Christmas dinner formed into little round cakes. note to self: do a future post on British foods and/or meals with funny names that make no sense.
My mom served a special soup she made by soaking the leftover turkey carcass from the day before in a giant pot until its steeping made the most delicious broth you have ever tasted, to which she would add homemade noodles she rolled and cut herself, fresh vegetables, and any turkey leftover from Christmas dinner, and serve it with a crusty loaf of bread (usually sourdough). Between you and me, the noodles were the best part.
I used to look forward to her Boxing Day soup more than dinner on Christmas Day. I miss my mom. A lot. She died at the age of 89 after being married to my father for 65 years and raising my sister, Patricia, and me. Patty is married and is a “Belsher” now; after my father died two years later at the age of 93, I became the oldest Wilkinson in our line, and the last for reasons which should be obvious – gay people can’t procreate, but as Harvey Milk once said, “God knows we keep trying!”
Wilkinson is an ancient Norman name that arrived in England after the Norman Conquest of 1066. The name Wilkinson comes from the Norman personal name Wilkins, which in turn is derived from the Germanic name Wilhelm, which is derived from the words will, meaning “resolution,” and helm, meaning “armed,” and is a cognate of the English name William.
The earliest record of Wilkinsons are found in Durham where they held a family seat. They were descended from Robert de Wintona, of Glamorgan in Wales, one of twelve knights who came into Glamorgan with Robert Fitzhamon, a Norman noble, in 1066. Fitzhamon was Sheriff of Kent and founder of Tewkesbury. The lineage is almost entirely confined to the northern half of England. It is best represented in Northumberland, Durham, Yorkshire, and Lancashire, and is also found throughout Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, and Cheshire.
There are several stories as to where the name “boxing day” came from. My favorite, told to me by my English grandfather, was that the servants had to work on Christmas Day at the dinners and festivities of the nobles, so they celebrated the holiday with their families on Dec. 26th. The lords and aristocrats would give their servants “Christmas boxes” filled with leftovers and small gifts after their parties, leading to the name. In the United States, the tradition of giving cash bonuses or gift vouchers to service employees derives from UK Boxing Day, although here it is now done before rather than after Christmas Day.
Other stories include that churches would put out “boxes” to collect alms for the poor at Christmas Mass, and the money and goods donated would be distributed the day after Christmas. It’s easy to see how this might have morphed into toy and canned food drives during the holiday season. We had one such box in the dining room of the assisted living facility where I live. Another story, as recounted by TimeOut – Hong Kong, is that British naval ships would seal a box of money at the start of a long voyage, and at the end, if the voyage had been a success and the ship returned safely to port, the box would be given in gratitude to God to the local vicar who would open it and give the money to his parishioners in need.
My family is bi, in that we are Anglican (Church of England, Episcopalian) on my father’s side, and we are Catholic on my mother’s side – her parents emigrated to America from what is modern-day Slovakia, a landlocked country bordered by Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east, Hungary to the south, Austria to the west, and the Czech Republic to the northwest, though Slovakia was called Czechoslovakia when they left just after World War I. The wedding deal was this: my sister and I were to be raised Catholic, but be made fully aware of our proud English/protestant lineage and heritage.
My protestant grandfather often told me of Queen Elizabeth I, who promulgated the Act of Supremacy in 1534 that separated the Church of England from the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and the Catholic pope in Rome establishing the English monarch as the head of the Church of England and making worship in the Church of England mandatory.
He stopped short of having us burn a Catholic on Boxing Day. But I know he wanted to!