Boxing Day and the true meaning of the feast of St Stephen

Few people in Britain know that Boxing Day is kept by the Christian churches as the feast of St Stephen, the first Christian martyr. But if they do know, it is not because they have a great familiarity with the church calendar. Many today do not even know, after all, what Christians commemorate at Easter, let alone on a day mainly set aside for turkey sandwiches and visits to the sales. Yet while the other two festivals within the Christmas octave, St John and the Holy Innocents, are hardly known at all, St Stephen’s day does still have a vague presence in popular thought because of John Mason Neale’s hymn or carol, published in 1835 and still a favourite, ‘Good King Wenceslas’.  According to the legend versified by Neale, ‘Wenceslas’ (Vaclav the Good, duke of Bohemia in the tenth century) ‘looked out’ at the snowy scene in which a poor man was gathering winter fuel ‘on the feast of Stephen’.