Today is Boxing Day in Great Britain, as well as in many Commonwealth countries — Australia, Canada, New Zealand and other nations that once were part of the British Empire.
Back in the good old days in England — when kings were kings, noblemen were noblemen, important people were the important people, and everyone else was everyone else — Boxing Day was the poor folks’ Christmas.
Christmas Day required a lot of preparation to make it a proper white-tie celebration of the birth of Jesus for the rich and powerful. Castles had to be decorated. The fatted goose had to be cooked. Wine had to be selected. Gifts had to be wrapped. Merriment had to be made merry. Then the mess had to be cleaned up.
All of this preparing and serving and cleaning up took so much time that the joyful workers who provided the day for the folks who counted had no time left over to celebrate the day themselves. So, centuries ago, the aristocracy generously came up with an alternate Christmas on December 26 for the servants, the poor and other socially insignificant people.
All these centuries later, no agreement has been reached on precisely why the day was called Boxing Day. The most common explanation is that the aristocrats boxed up leftovers from Christmas dinner, threw in a small gift and gave it to their servants — along with a day off.
Today, Boxing Day is an official holiday in Great Britain and throughout much of the Christian-dominated portion of what was once the nation’s far-flung global empire. Sadly for masters of the manors, however, the day is not what it used to be.
Socialism, trade unions and Critical Classist Theory have turned the day into no more than what Americans celebrate each year as Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Super Bowl Sunday.
Commoners, who once spent Boxing Day eating cold goose and thanking God for the freedom to spend a day away from the manor, visit their families and give Tiny Tim a tin whistle from the master, now waste the day just like the Crown’s one-time American colonists do: shopping, watching what they believe is football, surfing the internet for bargains and hunting for receipts in order to return the previous day’s gifts.
But while a return of Great Britain to the good old days of rule by a benevolent monarchy may be gone forever — along with the true meaning of Boxing Day — America may still have a chance not to have its goose cooked by representative democracy.
Recent national polls by “The Economist” magazine show nearly 60 percent of all Americans do not believe representative democracy is working. About a third say representative democracy is not the best form of government for the United States. (That opinion has risen by 9 percentage points since 2019.)
Among Republicans, nearly three-fourths of adults say they believe American democracy is failing. Among Democrats, nearly half hold the same belief. (Reasoning for these conclusions is quite different, but democracy still gets a black eye.)
Maybe the answer to our discontent with our form of government and our increasing discontent with each other is just to admit we gave King George III a bad rap when we wrote him that nasty declaration of our independence back in 1776.
We certainly have no shortage of leaders who want to be king — or, at least, lord of the manor. How bad could Boxing Day and some leftover goose really be?
