Today is Boxing Day, an occasion that really came into the vernacular in America in the last few years. The term comes to us from England, where it is traditionally celebrated on December 26th. It originated in Britain during the Victorian era, though some of its customs trace back even earlier. The name has a few potential origins, but the most widely accepted explanation relates to the practice of giving “Christmas boxes.” These boxes were traditionally given by wealthy households to their servants and workers the day after Christmas. The servants would receive boxes containing gifts, bonuses, and sometimes leftover food from Christmas celebrations. This was practical since the servants had to work on Christmas Day serving their employers, so December 26th became their time to celebrate with their own families.
The tradition also extended to tradespeople who provided services throughout the year, like postmen, errand boys, and trades workers, who would collect their “Christmas boxes” (essentially tips or small gifts) from their customers on this day.
In modern times, Boxing Day has evolved differently across various countries in the Commonwealth. In the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, it’s now known as a major shopping holiday (similar to Black Friday in the United States) and is also a time for sporting events, particularly football (soccer) in the UK. The tradition also has connections to charitable giving, as churches would often open their alms boxes (collection boxes for the poor) on this day and distribute the contents to those in need. This history reminds us how the holiday began as a day of giving to those who served others, though its modern incarnation has largely shifted toward commercial and recreational activities.
I spent yesterday paying attention to the goings on in the living room. Our house is such that for gatherings like this when the weather outside is not conducive for being in the out of doors, everyone either hangs out in the kitchen with Kim or in the living room, despite my quiet but commanding presence. I always feel a bit like Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. I generally stay quiet, absorbed in my own observation of events and people occasionally approach and interact with me with a modicum of caution. It’s not because “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”, but rather because “to deny our errors is to deny our self, for to be human is to be imperfect, somehow error prone. To be human is to ask unanswerable questions, but to persist in asking them, to be broken and ache for wholeness, to hurt and to try to find a way to healing through the hurt…” Does this help you understand why I am The Watchman of the living room? They are, after all, “only errand boys sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.” And it’s not even Boxing Day yet. So, there I sit, watching 22 other people navigate our living room during the holiday gathering, trying their best to pass the time pleasantly. They are each drawn to Buddy because he’s the cutest thing in the room and sometimes he’s compliant and lets them pet him for a moment and other times he is feisty and simply not having it. In some ways, buddy epitomizes the holiday gathering conundrum. You want to enjoy it, you try to enjoy it, sometimes it works, and sometimes not so much.
This year I have three special and new attractions, all positioned around the living room. Since holiday gatherings are all about food, and the kitchen is where food is king, I’ve realized (subconsciously, I think) that the living room has needed a draw. First and most prominently there is the massage chair, purchased during the county fair in Del Mar, where I was able to acquire the top-of-the-line massage chair as a floor model and at 40% of its normal price. This chair has all the features and everyone who visited spent anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour reclining and being kneaded and massaged by the chair. The chair accommodated guests who weighed from 40 pounds to 300+ pounds. If I had ever wondered whether I’d gotten value out of this purchase, this holiday gathering has relieved me of that concern.
The second attraction is my Apple Vision Pro, purchased on the recommendation of a very serious ex colleague who told me I simply had to have one. I have avoided virtual reality goggles ever since the first Oculus Quest was released five years ago, but I jumped right in on Apple Vision Pro. I get a strange form of entertainment sitting next to some new VR user while I instruct them on how to let their eye movements and their thumb-and-forefinger-tapping operate this amazing mechanism. Until there is a point where they grasp the process and start their own experimental movement through the system, I get to instruct them like I am teaching a baby how to walk. Then, when the full 3-D VR experience, a properly termed immersive video, takes hold of them, they are transported into a new state of being. When my daughter-in-law Jenna tried her hand, she stumbled on an immersive dinosaur experience that I had not yet found. This one had a very menacing dinosaur, reaching out, literally through the screen at the viewer with the kind of attentive and interactive interest that made you feel like it was deciding whether or not to have you for lunch. It struck me as funny that Jenna was not so scared by the dinosaur, but was so mortified by being in the Shark Tank that she had to rip off the goggles from her face to get out of the scene. I guess VR teaches us what really scares us in life versus what we can wrap our head around as only virtual reality. Fewer attendees of the gathering tried the Apple Vision Pro than tried the massage chair, but it was still a valuable and pleasing attraction for those who did.
The third and final living room attraction was a new device given to me for Christmas by my son Roger. It is something called the Oasis Mini, and it is a kinetic sand art box that allows you to use an iPhone app to generate sand art pictures, which are magically drawn by a moving metal ball bearing that moves through a round platform of white sand. I had the app draw pictures of the Grinch and Santa Claus and a cute penguin. It really did do an amazing job, but the slow moving nature of the drawing process turns out to be a problem capturing the attention span of children. It seems that children have a hard time waiting for the 20 minutes that it takes for this ball bearing to magically produce these sand art pictures. I know the device got accidentally toppled once and from the look of it at the end of the evening, I suspect that it got picked up and shaken more than once by some kid who wanted to speed up the process.
Two out of three winning attractions is a pretty good holiday batting average. The rest of the living room excitement consisted of the usual ripping open of packages and wondering what we are all going to do with the various chotchkas we had been given as gag gifts. The backdrop of our new set of five green and beige paper Christmas tree trees (purchased at West Elm) provided the perfect setting and the perfect metaphor for our holiday gathering. Life is as fleeting as a paper Christmas tree, and like Colonel Kurtz, we are all searching for meaning amongst them. Christmases come and go and we all have only so many of them left at any time. So, today I will box up all of the great memories of another Christmas while the decorations (including the paper Christmas trees) remain in place for another week to allow the good times to linger in the air. Meanwhile, the massage chair, the Apple Vision Pro and the sand art machine will go back to their appropriate corners and turn from attractions to odd novelties until our next gathering when hopefully those paper Christmas trees will have survived for another year.