The trouble with Boxing Day

You are bloated and binged. Your bloodstream is 35 per cent blood, 60 per cent a mix of Nurofen Plus, Gaviscon and acetaldehyde and 5 per cent Quality Street. You will either be making more mess, or clearing up the mess that everybody else is making more of. There are tiny pieces of plastic everywhere, perhaps even in you. If you’re with your family, all of them, including you, will have reverted to their personality and status of 1993 at the latest. Television – merely horrible and chiding throughout the rest of the year – has suddenly dumped on you a ginormous dollop of sickening sugar and thick, choking starch. 

The name Boxing Day comes from the lost Christian tradition of distributing presents in boxes to the poor of one’s parish. This has been replaced by the new tradition of a mass descent on the Westfield Shopping Centre in Shepherd’s Bush to buy presents in boxes for oneself. 

Must everything be a binge? Sadly, yes. We inevitably retain the animal instincts of the Neolithic Era, so our bodies automatically behave as if we are not guaranteed to eat so richly again. This is perhaps the glaringly obvious reason for our rates of obesity. Unless and until an injection of Wegovy becomes a weekly commonplace like doing the bins or the lottery, we are stuck with that. 

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But on Boxing Day we could, if we really set our hearts to it, pace ourselves just a bit. Festive overeating, like so many of the self-obsessive banes of modern life, occurs because we are affluent and bored. We want something to do to feel alive, or half-alive. 

There is another big issue with Boxing Day. Looming above it is the dread consideration that we will barely have time to recover before New Year’s Eve, and another bout of binging. The big, nothing-in-moderation, HAVE FUN NOW feast days of our calendar are jammed tight. Why, in the middle of months of grey nothing, do we have three closely adjacent days of state-sanctioned razzmatazz?

We have lost the old stations of the agricultural year, from Hocktide (April/May) to Lammastide (August) to the Harvest Festival (September), which used to spread the jollity and bonding more evenly, and definitely more communally. In their place we have a scattering of drily secular and meaningless Bank Holidays, again all gummed up in the sunshine months. And we’ve totally dropped the essential fasting-before-feasting element that we see in Lent, Ramadan or Yom Kippur. Fasting in those traditions is a penance, a time for reflection on gratitude, a reminder of the tenuousness of the food supply. We have filled that vacuum in our ritual life by reinventing fasting as an apparently super-scientific way to shift our fat. 

We forget, too, that we only started celebrating 1 January as the beginning of the new year in 1752. Before then it took place on the much more sensible 25 March, when you can just begin to feel buds bursting and blossoms blooming. January as the start of the year is a more recent innovation than the Act Of Union, newer than Shakespeare. This explains our cluttered calendar. 

March is when we really need the boost. November and December are made bearable by anticipation for Christmas, the tinsel and glitter in the dark, the little fires of Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night (although those are also ludicrously close together). As it stands, after New Year we are dropped back into the worst weather of the year with no sparkles to adorn the muddy slush, and only the dim prospect of drab, anonymous Easter to cheer us. The horrid smears of dread and flatness that are January and February – ‘Don’t you come around’, Barbara Dickson pleaded in 1980, and so say all of us – would be lifted by looking forward to a late March New Year, with all the rising sap and resurrection shuffle of Spring. Then we could really enjoy Boxing Day again, relax into it fully, and not shudder and clutch our bellies in a gluttonous pit stop between two blow-outs.