"Boxing Day is a little like being a four-year-old for a day. It releases you from thinking about the future or the past. For twenty-four hours everything else is on hold." Peter Jones
It's Boxing Day and a severe fire danger day - it's pretty hot and somewhat windy. So I at least am looking at things to do elsewhere because we are sort of surrounded by bush.
The only reason I mention that, is that one way of escaping the very mild worry of being at home is to go elsewhere, and so we went to the local shops - theoretically just to pick up the newspaper, although of course we bought a few other things as well. So we walk into Woolworths and what is virtually the first thing we see? The selection of hot cross buns on the left. Priceless as well - we had to ask how much. We later went to Aldi where it was a similar scene, and I'm sure Coles was the same. Really?
Why? This is my first post Christmas thought. Easter after all is not until 18-21 April in 2025. And we are not even into 2025 yet. I certainly love fruit buns, but why can't they just make fruit buns without the cross all year. As they used to do in the England of my youth. You only got the cross on top on Good Friday. I asked this question of the lady standing next to me in Woolworths, and she agreed wholeheartedly, although she did offer that when she did very occasionally see some without the cross and had bought them, she somehow felt they did not taste as good. Not as much cinnamon perhaps, she offered?
I am sure she and I are not alone in thinking these thoughts, so why do the supermarkets do it? Maybe all the bakeries too - I'm not sure about them. It's almost as if they want to rush you on to the next big spending spree as soon as possible. And their very presence certainly doesn't release you from thinking about the future - as in my opening quote. And if you are religious - we've just been celebrating the birth of Jesus - do we really want to start thinking about his death the day after? It's sort of gruesome, as well as distasteful commercially speaking. Although, that said, I shall probably buy some soon because I do love them.
The reason I didn't buy them today is because my fridge is completely full, so here is another post Christmas thought. Below what you see here is a vegetable drawer which is packed solid with things, and a meat drawer which contains half a cooked ham, a filleted smoked trout and various salamis and hams. It's a race to do something interesting with the various elements before they all go off. Braised cabbage, cherry compote, glazed carrots, zucchini from my green thumbs friend, a quarter of a massive cabbage, a bag of red peppers, lemons and oranges galore, plums, nectarines, blueberries ...
It's a challenge, and depending on my mood it is either a depressing chore - I hate waste - or an exciting opportunity to do interesting things with pretty ordinary ingredients. Today, as I said, I am fasting. Well on the brightside this gives me time to think and plan. On the downside it means all of those things are one more day closer to deterioration. So forget all those snobby words about always using the best ingredients you can get. Most of mine will be less than perfect. And alas they often are, and for the same reason, albeit on a smaller scale.
That large foil wrapped thing in the fridge is the turkey carcass which will tomorrow be made into turkey stock. Another traditional post Christmas occupation. I would have done it today, but with temperatures said to be peaking at near 40 degrees, it's not a good idea. Tomorrow though - and it might be an opportunity to put in some of those decaying veg. When I was looking for a suitable illustration for this little section a lot of them had almost more veg than carcass in them. And some of them had what looked to be large bits of meat still attached to the bones. Why would you do that? You eat the turkey. Mine will just have shreds of meat attached. And small pieces of clinging stuffing.
The real dilemma on the stock however, is that there will probably be quite a lot of it, which I shall freeze - but where? My own freezer is fairly full, but I shall shuffle stuff around a bit. The Gatehouse also has a small freezer compartment at the top of the fridge, but this year it is pretty full with stuff from my daughter-in-law's freezer which I am looking after whilst they are in the states. So I'm crossing fingers a bit here. Or else we shall be eating lots of soup and braises of one kind or another in the next few days. Not that there's room for much stock in the fridge either.
As I said at the beginning today is Boxing Day. What does that mean? I had a vague memory of my mother saying that traditionally one left a gift of beer - or somesuch for the dustbin man on Boxing Day. I even vaguely remember doing it one year. So I looked it up. Although there are ancient precedents, it seems that it really became a thing in the Middle Ages, on St. Stephen's Day - December 26th, St. Stephen being the first Christian martyr.
St. Stephen's Day itself is not necessarily related to generosity to the poor, I think that may come from the legend of Good King Wenceslas, who saw a poor peasant in a snowstorm gathering firewood, which inspired the king, to deliver food, and wine and firewood, to the man, with his page in tow, struggling through the snow and the cold. From the Middle Ages it seems that on St. Stephen's Day, alms were given to the poor from the alms box in the Church, into which people had placed donations throught the year. In time the donation came to be more associated with a donation to those who provided a service of some kind, whether it be the servants of the rich, or the tradesmen who provided such services. Hence the dustbin man:
"The Oxford English Dictionary gives the earliest attestation from Britain in 1743, defining it as "the day after Christmas day", and saying "traditionally on this day tradespeople, employees, etc., would receive presents or gratuities (a "Christmas box") from their customers or employers."
It's a British thing. I don't think other countries celebrate this. As I said, St Stephen's Day has various other traditions associated with it. But notably it's a Feast - the Feast of St. Stephen. When Boxing Day and St. Stephen's Day both fall on a Sunday, in some places, Boxing Day is demoted to the next day - December 27th.
Other Boxing Day traditions? Well today, in complete opposition to the tradition of giving to the poor and hardworking, we have the Boxing Day sales - a mad combination of greed and commerce in operation, although maybe this is being displaced by the Black Friday sales. I do not know. I shan't be going to test that theory out. I do remember that it did indeed seem to be chaotic. Maybe the bargains are so great that the poor rush to make use of the offers.
And here in Melbourne it's the opening day of the Boxing Day Test (cricket) - this year against England. Generally speaking if you catch a glimpse of a test match on the television screen, there are a lot of empty seats. Not the Boxing Day test as you can see from this photograph. It is packed. I wonder whether it is today in near 40 degrees? I wonder at this - how can one particular test match be so much more appealing than another, and in fact you would think that the last match of the series would have more appeal as the tension would be higher. At the beginning it's anyone's chance.
Christmas is sort of over now for this family, although it is also extended somewhat because of the birthday of one grandson tomorrow. This year's Christmas was joyful but tempered with sadness at the absence of our younger son and his family in the USA. But that's what happens as children grow isn't it? Long ago now I remember David and I eating turkey on our own in the back garden as both of our sons were doing the young Australian thing of going overseas for a few years - before deciding that actually Australia was the place to be. Here is the other family in Christmas gear, plus the girlfriend of the older grandson, and my son doing the really Christmassy thing by dressing up as Santa. It was taken on Christmas Eve, before the turkey on a pleasantly warm day.
Why do we do it all? For those of us who have no religious reasons that is - the food, the presents, the preparations for large reunions. The stress of it all. In a sense it's tribal isn't it? A gathering of the clan - large, but simultaneously small. Large in the sense of it being one of the few times that all the members, or as many as can, gather together. And as we know not all families are a compatible group of people. Family Christmases can be filled with familial tensions as well as all the food and presents stuff. Not ours thankfully.
Small in the sense of the family being the smallest human unit in a world population of, I think, now almost, 8 billion. I suppose that's not quite true - 'all the lonely people' and all that of course, and a group can be of friends rather than family, but then a group of friends is a sort of family. Small in the sense that the gathering is just a few hours in the lifetimes of the people involved.
And this year I was better prepared and organised, and also more uncaring about beautiful tables, Christmas decorations (there were none), and suchlike.
A last post Christmas thought. This is one of my last Met paintings of the year - today's choice In the Oise Valley by Paul Cézanne. It's a sketch more than a painting and honestly I wonder why they chose this for Boxing Day. The paintings in my desk diary are not really very season oriented, but you would have thought Boxing Day might have at least had something more seasonal - wintry I mean as, of course, the Met is American and it's cold there at the moment. In New York anyway, as my son and family will attest from the snowfields of Pennsylvania. Yesterday's Christmas Day picture was similarly unChristmassy in that it was one of Renoir's portraits of children at a piano - and yet it was somehow festive. This is just sort of nothing - maybe Boxing Day too is sort of nothing. Although really it should be a chance to let go, to relax, to leave all the stress behind.
Was it all worth it? Well it's one of our lives' great pleasures to catch up with our children and their children, so yes. I think we all had fun and the food was pretty good, if not haute cuisine. Tradition triumphed on the food front, and the presents front was less lavish this year - well the grandchildren are growing into adults, and that makes present sourcing much more difficult, and they don't care as much as small children anyway. And it's over. Time to look forward to hot cross buns.
YEARS GONE BY
December 26
2023 - Christmas is/was ... stuffing - yes indeed - maybe even more than the turkey.
2022 - Nothing
2020 - Cranberry sauce
2019 - Muslin or cheesecloth?
2018 - Pandoro di Verona
2016 - An apple
Comments