Boxing Day

(I’m reposting some older, seasonal articles on the feed’s off days. This article was first published on Wordorigins.org on 20 December 2023.)

Boxing Day is 26 December, the day after Christmas. It is celebrated in Britain and many of the Commonwealth countries, including Canada, but not in the United States. The name arises out of the old practice of giving servants a box of money and gifts on that day. The name Boxing Day appears in the mid eighteenth century, although the practice of distributing gifts to servants and apprentices is older.

The practice of distributing money to the poor on 26 December, St. Stephen’s Day on the Roman Catholic calendar, dates to medieval times, but that is not the origin of the later practice or the phrase Boxing Day.

As for the history of the term itself, the verb to box, meaning to place things in a container, and corresponding noun boxing date to the mid sixteenth century. We also see the phrases Christmas box and butler’s box by the sixteenth century, but the earliest uses of these come out of gambling. At the holidays, aristocratic gamers would put aside a portion of their winnings in a box to give to the butler. We see Christmas box in this context in a sermon on the evils of usury that was printed in 1558:

Marie, as nedefull may we count them amoong vs, as amoo[n]g gamners, is ten and fowr for a Christmas box, that in smal processe of play (if the banks be not the bigger) is like to rob all ye boord.

And in another sermon on usury in 1591 we see butler’s box:

Now, you long to heare what the Vsurer is like. To what shal I like[n] this generatio[n]? They are like a Butlers box: for as all the counters at last come to the Butler; so all the mony at last commeth to the Vsurer, ten after ten, & ten after ten, and ten to ten, til at last he receiue not only ten for an hundreth, but an hundreth for ten. This is the onely difference, that the Butler can receiue no more than he deliuered: but the Vsurer receiueth more than he deliuereth.

And there is this 1628 witticism by John Taylor. Taylor (1578–1653) dubbed himself “The Water Poet.” He was a Thames waterman by trade, but a very successful poet and writer on the side. Widely read in his own day, he is virtually forgotten today. Literary elites like Ben Jonson criticized his language as vulgar and common, but that didn’t seem to affect his popular appeal. He made this comparison of parliament to a butler’s box:

One asked a fellow what the Westminster Hall was like; Marry, quoth the other, it is like a Butlers Box at Christmas amongst gamesters, for whosoeuer loseth, the Box will be sure to bee a winner.

But by the time Taylor had written this, the use of Christmas boxes had spread and no longer was just a practice among gamblers. The earliest reference to servants in general, in this case apprentices, getting a Christmas box appears in Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 French-English dictionary:

Pillemaille, as Palemaille; or such a box as our London Prentices beg withal before Christmas.

And by the middle of the next century we start seeing uses of Boxing Day in reference to the day after Christmas. The earliest I’m aware of is in testimony given in a London criminal trial on 17 January 1743. Three men had been accused of mugging a man, and the witness’s testimony helped exonerate them as none of them matched the witness’s description of the mugger:

Tuesday in Christmas Week, about Eight in the Evening, I was coming over this broad Place, and saw a Man come up to this lame Man, and knock him down—It was the Day after Boxing Day—It was a black, well-set Man, in his own Hair, that knocked him down, and then he took him by the Collar; with that he cried out, You will throttle me. I saw him take a Stock off his Neck, and put it into his Pocket, and then I heard him say, He has took my Stock, my Clasp, and my Money.

And the London General Advertiser newspaper ran this ad on 25 December 1747:

This Day is Publish’d,
Price 6d. each Plain, 1 s. Colour’d,
CHRISMASS [sic] GAMBOLS, representing
The Humours of Christmas and Boxing Day, in two Plates neatly Engrav’d.

Today, Boxing Day is chiefly celebrated by shopping at post-holiday sales—a practice that is also celebrated in the United States, although the term Boxing Day isn’t used there.

Sources:

Cotgrave, Randle. A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues. London: Adam Islip, 1611, s.v. pillemaille. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

General Advertiser (London), 25 December 1747, 3/1. NewspaperArchive.com.

Old Bailey Proceedings Online. “Trial of Richard Stroud, Henry Stroud, Edward Taylor. Violent Theft: Highway Robbery” (t17430114-29), 17 January 1743.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2021, s.v. Boxing Day, n., box, n.2., box, v.2., boxing, n.1.; March 2020, s.v. Christmas Box, n.; September 2018, s.v. butler’s box, n.

Smith, Henry. The Examination of Usury in Two Sermons. London: R. Field for T. Man, 1591, 30–31. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

A Speciall Grace, Appointed to Haue Been Said After a Banket at Yorke. London, John Kingston for Nicholas England, 1558, n.p. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Taylor, John. Wit and Mirth. London: Henrie Gosson, 1628, item 15, sig. B3r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: Anonymous photographer, 2019. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.