Bubble and Squeak (OOP) Was Re: SC - Boxing Day Recipes?

[Elysant1@aol.com]

>A freind of my mother's wrote me for advice:  His grandson is doing a 
>school
>report on Boxing Day (Dec. 26), and wondered if I knew any traditional or
>historic recipes associated with the Day After Christmas.

Every year, someone asks my husband about Boxing Day.  Seems to be one of 
those things people save up to ask when they meet a Brit.

According to him (whose experience is as the son of a Scot and a Midlander, 
raised in post-WWII Essex among Cockneys, spending holidays alternately with 
either parent's extended family.) Boxing Day was the day the rich sent their 
servants, who of course had to work Christmas day, home with boxes of 
leftovers.  So, for the rich it was a day of charity, for the serving class 
it was the day they got to celebrate Christmas, and for everyone else it was 
the day you went back to work, and it pretty much hardly existed during his 
childhood as the whole social fabric had changed.

He is amused that Americans do think of it as an actual holiday for the 
Brits.  No one in his working class family celebrated it, though his mum 
recalls in her childhood in the 1920's her dad getting boxes of food and 
clothes from 'the house' after all holidays.

We have heard more and more people 'celebrate' by giving boxes (gifts) to 
people like the postman and milk carrier but he thinks of them as yuppies 
with pretensions.

The idea of using it as a day to collect for the poor is a better modern 
'take' on it.  But the lead up to Christmas is already full of that (as it 
is here) so it seems counter productive as surely more can be collected the 
weeks before than the day after?

Oh! and he says that stores didn't used to have continual rounds of sales 
like they do here, but steeply marked things down/cleared out old stock 
after Christmas.  His mum got up early on Boxing Day to join the mob at the 
BHS (British Home Store--think Sears as it used to be) and the local shops.  
  The adverts called them Boxing Day Sales.  His dad used to tease his mum 
about having to  'box' for the goods she brought home.  Now they sale all 
the time like we do, so there's still a big sale, but it's not the scene it 
was.

Bonne


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