Boxing Day: Gift With Love

Dec 26, 2009, 12.00am IST
VITHAL C NADKARNI.

If you believe the cartoons, on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, the bills and IOUs supposedly come in to roost – not necessarily via the chimney – after all that merry splurging and shopping.


According to another send-up, Reindeer and Santa square off against one another in a boxing ring on this day! That could explain why some folks in South Africa have quietly renamed the public holiday as the Day of Goodwill.


Jokes apart, Boxing Day is for giving gifts to grown-ups. It’s somewhat similar to distributing baksheesh during Diwali to those who have stood and served you throughout the year. It’s not as widespread as Christmas because it only started in England under Queen Victoria’s reign. This may be the reason why Boxing Day celebrations are largely confined to Commonwealth countries.
Also known as St Stephen’s Day, it was an occasion for the upper class to give gifts of cash, or other goods, in wooden boxes to those from the lower classes: the misanthropic Ebenezer Scrooge from Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol fit the former, and his family-loving factotum, Bob Cratchit, the latter.

Boxing Day thus enables you to get off the hedonist “I-me-mine” treadmill. It offers a shift away from what C S Lewis, creator of the Narnia Chronicles, called the ‘Need-love’ mode to a ‘Gift-love’ one. Of course we are busy in life seeking the things we need and love, but it is often not just for ourselves, but for the nearest and dearest who depend on us. “These points write Stephen J Post in Why Good Things Happen to Good People. “This thesis is old, but it can be forgotten, so it bears repeating from time to time.”
Sincerity is the key to mindful giving and its best, is supposed to be anonymous. The original St Nicholas had a reputation for secret gift giving such as putting coins in the shoes of those who left them out for him. He thus became the model for Santa Claus whose English name comes from the Dutch Sinterklaas.


Boxing Day also supposedly came from the tradition of opening the alms boxes placed in churches over Christmas season. The clergy distributed the contents amongst the poor, the day after Christmas. “We cannot grasp Gift-love like a coin, but this warmth and concern for another is more real and meaningful than anything we can possess,” explains Post. “When we cultivate sincere Gift-love through day-to-day practice, we inadvertently discover the great paradox that underlies fuller human flourishing – in the giving of self lies the surprising discovery of a happier and healthier self. This paradox underlies most spiritual and moral wisdom.”
The Bhakti traditions of India and spiritual beliefs around the world have celebrated this paradox of ‘giving leading to growth’. More recently, a survey of 30,000 American households found that those who gave to charity were 43 per cent more likely to say they were ‘‘very happy’’ about their lives than those who did not give.


“The survey doesn’t show whether giving made people happy, or happy people were more likely to give,” says Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer. “But the anecdotal evidence is strong – many people find that when they begin to give, they free themselves from the acquisitive treadmill and find new meaning and fulfilment in their lives.”