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Boxing Day fodder - Your ticket to pre-hunt rocket fuel

I have an AppleCare specialist in Austin, Texas who’s become my phone pal because we talk so often (I had one of the old iMacs with the boot-legged capacitors that melted).

He actually picks up instead of letting my call bounce to voice-mail when he sees my area code light up in call display because he likes talking with Canadians. Apparently we don’t yell like his other clients.

Anyway, we got to talking about the holidays. I teased him because he was away for two weeks right before Christmas.

“You Americans are so lucky, you have one big holiday from American Thanksgiving through to Christmas,” I said.

The years I lived in the States it seemed it was a whole month of festive bingeing that started with a turkey-fest the third week of November and went through to the penultimate turkey-fest Christmas Day. Mucho socializing, consumption and other excesses that seemed like a good idea at the time went on in between. I don’t know how we got any work done. In fact, now that I think of it, we didn’t.

“Yeah, but you guys have Boxing Day and Family Day,” he lamented.

I assured him that Albertans were the only Canadians lucky enough or smart enough to get Family Day in February. This mid-winter holiday helps break up the bleak prospect of virtually no holidays between New Year’s and Easter, a period of nearly four months without so much as a single long weekend to interrupt the endless spectre of the quotidian. But they — no, make that we — have to suffer the scourge of the tar sands to pay for it.

Apparently a new one-day national holiday costs the Canadian economy something like $30 gazillion in lost productivity. I say the heck with that. In the spirit of Ad Buster’s Buy Nothing Day, we should institute a new holiday right at the end of grim January and call it Do Nothing Day. In fact we should work in a Do Nothing Day in every month that doesn’t have a long weekend.

In China, people were outraged a few years back when government officials proposed doing away with the three Golden Week holidays, or at least cutting way back on them so they were more like Golden Day holidays (last month they were finally chopped).

Earlier, the national government had instituted a whole week for holidays around Chinese New Year, another week May 1 for Labour Day, and yet another week off for National Day in October.

The strategy was ostensibly to give people more time to visit family and increase tourism. But at the time we Westerners thought those wily Chinese Commu-crats had cooked it all up to reduce the annoying paperwork and re-arrangement of shifts that ensue when people take their holidays at different times.

Turns out it was all just a ploy to increase consumption, something we Westerners know nothing about.

The irony of this holiday perversity really rears its head when you realize that Boxing Day started in England as a way of giving — to the poor and to the needy.

In Alberta when I was growing up, boxing was the big draw Friday nights on the only channel we got, so kids liked to tease each other that Boxing Day meant we got to hit each other, preferably without gloves.

Parents and aunties told us that no, no, no, it was called Boxing Day because in England people went round with boxes of food, presumably turkey and plum pudding or trifle leftovers, to share with friends and neighbours. In retrospect, this had a ring of authenticity to it.

But my pal, Mark, who hails from England heartily denies this, at least during his era. He says Boxing Day there also meant that the big department stores like Selfridges and Harrods would have sales with one or two real bargains to lure in the crowds. Otherwise, all the excess merchandise brought in for Christmas that didn’t sell was marked down to try and get rid of it.

In his grandfather’s day, Boxing Day meant the servants, the chauffer and the gardener had the day off after the big hub-bub and all the preparations for Christmas Day. Leftovers were left in the icebox for the lord and master to eat.

Lots of households would also gather round in the morning for a hunt, which essentially meant a pack of hounds chasing a hare and tearing it apart when they got hold of it.

Sounds like a typical Boxing Day round our house.

In England, Mark and his family would follow the proceedings on foot or by car, taking along sandwiches and having a glass or three of the traditional punch that was served as an alcoholic breakfast. Every hunt had its own recipe and even he as a boy would have a sip.

If you haven’t had enough “punch” in your holiday season yet, here are a couple of Boxing Day recipes right from England that would fuel any hunt, even one for a bargain.

Happy Holidays!

 

Victorian Boxing Day Punch

Take the juice of 10 lemons and the thin rind of 3, the juice of 4 Seville oranges and the rind of 2. Cut the rinds into fine thin strips. Take 6 glasses of melted calves’ foot jelly and 2 quarts of boiling water and stir them together in a hot jug. Allow it to cool slightly. Place 1 pint of French brandy, 1 pint of white wine and a glass full of crushed sugar into the punch bowl. Lace the whole thing with Jamaican rum. Pour the melted calves’ foot jelly and water into the alcohol, and stir in the rinds and citrus juice with a stick of sweet briar, if you can find one.

 

1950s Boxing Day Punch

4 gallons red wine

2 bottles port

1 bottle brandy

Add Angostura bitters and the grated peel of one tangerine, plus ground ginger, mace, nutmeg and cinnamon to taste. Heat it but never allow it to boil. Stick some cloves in a lemon and float it in the punch. Serve in tumblers. The original recipe notes that it should suffice for a Boxing Day hunt party of 30-40 people. It will even allay the need for solid food. Guaranteed to be hangover-proof!

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who reminds you that there will be half a million tons of wrapping paper in landfills this holiday season in B.C. alone.