December 26 - Boxing Day

Most people have heard of Boxing Day, but not as many know what it is other than that it falls on the day after Christmas.
The best guess most people are able to hazard is that Boxing Day is the day when rich people give boxes of food, gifts, and sometimes money to their servants on the day after Christmas.
This is more or less what Boxing Day would one day become, but to get to the true origins of Boxing Day, you would have to go back to 1763 when the Duke of Gloucester, one Richard Joseph Louis III decreed the day after Christmas to be a day for men to "unshackle themselves from the stresses and overindulgences of the holidays, and to adopt more sprightly humours through rigorous physical exertion."
A noted (and feared) pugilist, the Duke was of the mind that hand to hand combat was the ideal activity for bringing about the twin benefits of stress relief and exercise. And so he declared December 26 Boxing Day.
According to the Duke's rules, Boxing Day was a day on which any man, regardless of class, social standing, occupation, parentage, age, or disposition, could challenge any other man to a sparring match--and that man was obligated to agree to the fight under the pain of the stockades.
Not that anyone ever backed down. On the contrary, when December 26 hit, the streets, back alleys, pubs, churches and everywhere else were filled with men beating the tar out of each other, a particularly striking sight when there were still so many Christmas trees and decorations around.
Boxing Day was an especially big hit among the underprivileged classes who relished the opportunity to take out a year's worth of humiliation, overwork, physical and mental abuse, and harsh treatment on their bosses, superiors, teachers, commanding officers, and the like.
They looked forward to it all year, and many began training for the day weeks, even months in advance.
For their part, hoping to avoid spectacular ass whoopings from their physically superior underlings, many bosses tried to buy their employees off by doling out astonishingly generous Christmas bonuses. Sometimes it worked and the challenge to a fight was never laid down.
But not always.
It wasn't long before many men of high social standing stayed at home on Boxing Day, hiding behind closed doors until the 27th.
But other members of the upper classes embraced it. For 364 days a year, they had to behave like gentlemen. But on Boxing Day, they could be men. Many of them, like almost everyone from the lower social classes, looked forward to it more than Christmas.
And it remained this way until December 26, 1787 when the Duke of Gloucester died from injuries he sustained while beating the snot out of a 250 pound longshoreman from Birmingham.
He was 74 years old.
With his death came a new Duke who was very much opposed to Boxing Day, and he ordered an immediate stop to it.
However, the public outcry against his directive was so severe, so harsh, so total, that the new Duke actually feared for his life. If he was going to take away the men's beloved Boxing Day, he would have to offer them something else in return.
He consulted with the women of the Dukedom, who, perhaps predictably, were also less than enamored with Boxing Day. And the compromise they came up with was that on the day after Christmas, the haves would put together an offering of food, gifts, and money to give to the have nots. Said offerings would be packed up and delivered in boxes.
And that is where Boxing Day comes from.