The day after Christmas in UK and most of the (British) Commonwealth is known as Boxing Day; it is a national holiday. India and some former colonies did not and have not celebrated it. People, including me, live another day for rest, relaxation, good food, merriment, and celebration. It is a national holiday; who will be opposed? I felt USA should embrace it because it is a holiday and why not have a two day holiday for Christmas which people in Christian countries celebrate. But I didn’t know its origin and that it had links to exploitation of labor, abuse of Indians and Africans, indentureship, slavery, and mockery (derision, contempt, jeering, sneering, scoffing) of the poor in the Anglophone West Indies until I did some queries and research. Portuguese, Chinese, and Mixed races (Coloreds or Mulattoes) did not experience the same level of abuses and derision as Indians and Africans). The elites lived in exclusive compounds away from the subjects or workers with hardly any socialization between the two groups. And each ethnic white, English, Scottish, Welsh, Colored had their own community and club. The Portuguese, coming from Madeira, were not accepted as Whites and also had their own clubs.
Encyclopedias and dictionaries define or describe Boxing Day, “celebrated on December 26th, as a tradition of (the rich) giving gifts in ‘boxes’ to servants, tradespeople, and the poor, stemming from servants getting the day off after working Christmas Day, and of (Anglican) churches opening alms boxes for donation distribution” to the poor. The Anglicans dominated the politics of the colonies. The Scottish and Catholics also had a lot of influence on the people.
According to publications, the name comes from these “Christmas boxes, representing both the employers’ gifts and the (Anglican) church’s collections for the needy”. The alms were collected over the preceding year in a box, and the box was opened and then distributed to the poor. That was not known to have happened in Guyana or the West Indies; churches were not known ti distribute money to the poor. The wealthy did make boxes and distributed to the poor.
As penned in one publication, “wealthy households would give their servants Christmas Day off, but they had to work, so the following day (Dec 26th) was their holiday, where they received gift boxes (bonuses, leftovers, etc.) from their masters to take home to their families”.
As revealed to me in research from conversations with older descendants of the indentured Indians and of slaves and of surviving indentured laborers themselves, the (White) managers of plantations or estates would distribute left overs from their Christmas parties the day after to their servants and to the poor. They would box the unwanted left overs from their grandiose parties funded from the profits of the estates and shared them to the poor. The plantations owners and managers earned huge profits from free and cheap labor provided by African slaves and Indian indentureds. To celebrate their gains, the plantations elites would have luxurious and extravagant Christmas parties at their homes which themselves were funded by the estates. The (freed) Blacks and the indentured and or their descendants labored at the opulent homes of the managers or estate owners including on Christmas Day. The workers were lucky to get a day off the day after Christmas for their hard yearlong labor and for working on Christmas Day as servants of the white elite. The wives and children of and the managers and their White supervisors of the estates would come to their respective veranda of their extravagant homes on Boxing Day morning and throw coins out to crowds assembled below. The elites lived in exclusive homes away from the common workers who created wealth for the former. There would be a scramble for the coins. The elite would cheer in glee and amusement as the subjects scramble and fighting each other for a pittance thrown on the ground. However small they were, that would be a lot of money for slaves, indentured and or their descendants during the oppressive colonial era. In addition to coins, the elite would also distribute ‘ leftovers food’ from their Christmas feasts. The workers and the estate dwellers would be happy for the handouts.That practice was long done away with during the struggle for independence that started in earnest in the 1950s.
The elites would also indulge in horse racing on that day. And that tradition has continued till this day in almost all of the Anglophone Caribbean. I used to love going to the races on Boxing Day. It was also a day for the public to go to the movies if they didn’t go horse racing.
