A lot of us are fortunate to enjoy the day following Christmas as a holiday, and in Commonwealth countries we call it the “Boxing Day”.
The history of boxing day is no different to what its name implies.
It was once a day where masters let servants’ box leftover food from Christmas for themselves and a day where the wealthy boxed food and goodies to be given away as alms boxes, a day, as they were busy serving on the Christmas day, and this goes on.
It is a day of charity and compassion, marking that the have-nots get an opportunity be treated well in celebrating Christmas.
What it has turned in to is something entirely different – everybody accumulating things and entertaining themselves.
It is nowadays celebrated mostly in the Commonwealth countries as a massive shopping holiday where you get the top-most bargains for the year. Also, it is an iconic day for entertainment with annual traditional sporting events happening.
Let’s talk about the shopping part. When this started happening is not marked with a prominent incident, but the logical explanations stand.
After the year end stock take, with a projection of annual revenue for the year, boxing day creates an important window of opportunity for providing a final push for meeting annual sales targets for the retailers. With Christmas shopping happening over a few weeks/months for gifts, give aways and food and grocery, the sudden demand surge goes down when people go on to holiday and family mood and this push is designed to keep the momentum going till the end of Christmas.
Once again, the peak demand on one day is not the best as shops and retails fronts are not designed handle massive crowds on one day, so the demand is flattened leading up to the first week of the new year with bargains and sales to keep the holiday period purchasing to go on.
Christmas is a religious, cultural and more recently a heavily designed commercial event. There is nothing wrong in celebrating, relaxing, giving, receiving or consuming. It is the excessive push and pressure for artificial demand surge, prompting us to think that this is what boxing day (let along Christmas) is for that we need to be careful of as consumers and buyers!
References
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Boxing-Day
https://study.com/academy/lesson/boxing-day-history-facts-traditions.html