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Boxing Day Punches Above its Weight



Each year, Christmas shows up wrapped up in tinsel and lots of sentiment, and for a brief moment the world pretends that it has learned how to love. We sing of peace while tiptoeing carefully around the bodies that peace is yet to hug. We speak of joy then we turn around and ration it. We light candles while entire neighborhoods live under the threat of structural darkness. Christmas tells the story of a child born into precarity, yet we have learned how to sentimentalize the manger and sanitize the risk involved.

As much as we glide around the issue, the fact still remains that the Holy Family fled and hid to escape the structural darkness that never truly went away. So, Christmas, when told honestly, is about incarnation under pressure. God shows up where empire counts people as expendable and calls it order. God shows up without permission, paperwork, or without an invitation from power. That alone should trouble our carols.

And then comes Boxing Day. Boxing Day is not as visible as Christmas Day. Historically, it was the day when servants, laborers, and the poor received boxes (leftovers, wages, alms) from those who had feasted the day before. It was a reminder that celebration without redistribution is just hollow crap. Boxing Day exposes Christmas if Christmas refuses to share. It also asks an uncomfortable question: who is still hungry after the hymns fade? Who is cleaning up after the feast? Who is expected to be grateful for crumbs while others debate the menu?

If Christmas announces that God has come near, Boxing Day asks whether we have. If Christmas declares good news to the poor, Boxing Day measures whether that news has moved beyond proclamation into practice. It is the day that reveals whether our theology has legs or whether it collapses under the weight of its own hypocrisy.

What a world we live in eh? This world loves Christmas imagery but resists what Christmas demands. We adore the baby, and then recoil from the adults that the baby grows into. You know who I'm referring to: the worker, refugee, immigrant, incarcerated, person of Color, poor, differently abled, LGBTQIA+, woman - the one who disrupts the economy by insisting on dignity. We prefer a Christ who stays small enough not to challenge systems, small enough to fit on a shelf, and small enough to be ignored once the tree comes down.

Boxing Day does not embrace or celebrate that version of faith, because it's bs. It reminds us that the manger story moves toward redistribution, repair, and responsibility, and that God’s arrival rearranges social order and not just personal feeling. The child who was born in Bethlehem grows up to speak plainly about wealth, power, and neighbors. The same Gospel that gives us angels also gives us warnings.

And still, stubborn hope shows up anyway. It organizes when policies do harm and silence becomes complicity. It understands joy as resistance, generosity as strategy, and community as survival. It knows that Boxing Day is a continuation and not the afterthought that it has been made into. 

Christmas tells us that God is with us. Boxing Day asks whether we will be with one another. So, between these two is a holy tension. One announces grace, and the other tests it.

For God's sake, be brave enough to celebrate both. Be decent enough to refuse a faith that ends with singing and never reaches sharing. May the boxes we open lead us to the boxes we are willing to give. And may the hope born in fragile places keep pressing us toward a world where no one is left waiting outside the feast, wondering if God remembers their name.


We'll talk about Kwanzaa. 

#Boxingday #Christmas #Historylesson 

Born and raised on The Gem of the Caribbean (Antigua and Barbuda), I am an immigrant living in the U.S. with my Fantastic Four and High School boops.

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