Today Is My Day!

Happy Holidays. Today's the big day... that day that we eagerly await for as soon as the Halloween pumpkin is tossed on the compost heap- the Feast of Stephen or Boxing Day or Wren Day. Well actually, this is the start of The Week of Stephen. It begins today - the Feast Day of St. Stephen, to whom it shall be noted, was the 1st Christian to be stoned, no small significance to me personally.

At Post Apocalyptic Bohemia, birthdays are celebrated with a week long celebration honoring the recipient with a series of celebrations & kindnesses. We start today with St. Stephen’s day & wraps up onJanuary 3rd with the birthday of yours truly. Today, I am going to start to prepare for my birthday with a week of being celibate, doing a cleansing fast: no alcohol, no pizza… unless I should slip up & end up getting drunk & getting laid.

St. Stephen was stoned to death in 34 AD by a mob led by Paul (when he was still Saul). In Acts it says:
Then they secretly persuaded some men to say, "We have heard Stephen speak words of
blasphemy against Moses & against God." So they stirred up the people & the elders & the teachers of the law. They seized Stephen & brought him before the Sanhedrin. For we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place & change the customs Moses handed down to us." Since Stephen was the first martyr, he's referred to as a protomartyr, a word we only get to use once a year.


Good King Wenceslas is the big musical number for St. Stephen's Day. The tune was originally written for the song, Tempus Adest Floridum (It is time for flowering), a 13th-century spring carol first introduced in the 1582's Swede/Finn co-production: Piae Cantiones. Perhaps you have seen it? If you've never really listened to the lyrics to Good King Wenceslas, they deal with the Bohemian King going out on St. Stephen's Day to give alms to the poor. A rich Duke’s page is freezing to death but Wenceslas's footprints provide magical warmth…. or something like that.

If you live in the Anglo-land, then you don't need to have Boxing Day explained... unless you're from the USA or Ireland, the only Anglo-ish countries that do not celebrate it. On Boxing Day, you give a gift to your inferiors. This seems to me to be very patronizing & classist, or rather-very English. "Oh it's nothing. Just a little something I, your superior in class, got for you, one of the lower orders." Even the English seemed to have realized this seemed a bit condescending, now they just use today to take advantage of after-Christmas sales, to buy stuff for themselves. Back in a time far way, the Husband & I would travel from our home in Seattle to one of our favorite cities- Vancouver BC, to enjoy the Boxing Day sales. Merchandise at the Canadian stores- Eaton’s & The Bay Company etc, would be marked down 60%, which with the strength of the US dollar against the Canadian(those were the days!), would make for terrific savings. We would then spend our saved money on dining out at the swellest spots in Vancouver, & leaving tips for our inferiors.


In Wales, the people of my own heritage, they have their own peculiar brand of St. Stephen's Day acknowledgement. On what they named- Gŵyl San Steffan, it is customary to bleed the livestock & slash female servants with holly branches. How can we can explain the Welsh?

Why no Boxing Day in Ireland? The Irish celebrate- Lá an Dreoilín, or Wren Day. Before I looked it up, I thought- "Oh, Wren's Day. They must venerate the little birds on this day." Actually, traditionally on this day, young hooligans called- Wrenboys got together & hunted down the tiny, defenseless creatures. Then they'd go around with the dead wren's tiny corpse fastened to the end of a pole, singing songs & drinking. Wrens have a reputation for treachery in Irish culture & legend has it that wrens betrayed Irish forces during a Viking attack & so the Irish on this day kill the wrens out of revenge. By the 1930s, wrens were almost extinct in Ireland. That will teach a lesson to those traitorous wrens!