How Canadians Celebrate Boxing Day
In Canada, the day after Christmas is called Boxing Day. It's been afederal public holidaysince 1871, so you can think of it as a bonus day off work, unless you work in the kind of retail which sells popular things. But at least you'll get overtime pay for working on a statutory holiday.
How Canadians celebrate Boxing Day
Canadians celebrate Boxing Day by going out to the stores to shop! Boxing Day is the Black Friday of Canada. It's all about the same kinds of shopping deals as Black Friday, and it's got the added advantage of having all those brand new gift cards burning a hole in your pocket.
Friends and family? Well, there's a little bit of carryover there too, mostly among Canadians who've travelled to be with loved ones. After all, the family holidays aren't completely over yet. But you've pretty much got to be snowed in or dead broke to skip the Boxing Day shopping deals altogether.
How can you shop on a stat holiday?
Boxing Day's been a federal holiday for almost as long as Canada's been a country. So, in theory, retail stores are supposed to be closed. In a few parts of Canada, they still are. What happens there is that all the deals and heavy shopping get moved to Dec 27th instead.
But in most big cities in Canada, the major retail stores all open on December 26. It didn't use to be that way! Just a couple of decades ago, nearly all of the stores were firmly shut, except for a few "tourist destination" stores like the Eaton Centre in Toronto which were exempt from the law.
Then a few non-tourist stores started opening on Boxing Day. They were fined by the police for opening on a stat holiday, but they did enough business that the fine really didn't matter.
Of course, then the other stores couldn't afford to stay closed. Internet shopping added some extra pressure. In just a few years, Boxing Day became a huge retail day for the large majority of Canadians.
The strict Boxing Day law'sstill on the booksin the Canadian Atlantic provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador. It's been repealed everywhere else.
Now it's got to the point that some stores open at 5 am. After all, there's always a few shoppers who'll get up that early to snag the big deals. It's a lot colder in Canada on December 26 than it is during the US Black Friday, but little by little,the outdoor lineups are getting longer.
But thankfully, there's still no violence or guns in Canadian Boxing Day shopping. It's too cold for those kinds of fights!
History
Boxing Day comes originally from England, from back in the days of the British Empire. The tradition at that time was that employers would give gifts to their servants and tradesmen around Christmas or immediately afterwards, in the same spirit that people today give a bit of Christmas monetary cheer to their letter carriers or some workplaces give out a Christmas bonus. Servants would actually have to work on Christmas Day, so those gifts would be given on the next day, which eventually became Boxing Day.
That tradition actually goes all the way back to the Middle Ages, when it was the custom to give gifts to the poor on St Stephen's Day, the day after Christmas. That's what the carol "Good King Wenceslas" refers to. There's also all kinds of folklore and stories about St Stephen going in disguise among the poor and rewards being given to those who were kind and in need.
During the Renaissance, England built a global empire. When those countries started going independent en masse, it transitioned to the Commonwealth of Nations. Many of the countries in the Commonwealth still observe Boxing Day today, although some of them have renamed it to their own names or taken it back to St Stephen's Day so it's not so British. That's why Dec 26th is Boxing Day in Northern Ireland and St Stephen's Day in the Republic of Ireland.
Why is it called Boxing Day?
Well, lots of people use the day to get rid of all the Christmas gift boxes, and to box up some of their Christmas gifts for returns. So the name really makes sense today. In most stores, you can't return Christmas gifts until after New Year's Day, but there's no harm in getting ready and getting all those boxes, gifts, and future returns out of the way.
But that's not where the name came from originally. It was already solidly Boxing Day by the time Dickens was writing the "Pickwick Papers." The traditions go back for centuries before the modern retail frenzy!
The truth is that no one really knows for sure. There were a lot oftraditions associated with boxesthat happened between Christmas and New Year's Day, and any or all of them could have contributed to the name.
One of the most solid leads isPepys' diary. It's always nice when you've got a person who's willing to chronicle day-to-day life in a fair bit of detail. Way back on Dec 19th, 1663, he mentions giving "something to the boys' box against Christmas."
There's a lot of references by other people to Christmas boxes, which could be either a box for the poor or a Christmas bonus. There's even some places where people still call the tip they give to the paperboy a Christmas box, even though it's got nothing to do with boxes anymore.
