Good morning, Paddy, and a happy Boxing Day to you all. I’m delighted to meet you although, to be honest, the circumstances could be better. I’d really rather be in bed right now and yet, somehow, here I am, like Good King Wenceslaus, looking out on the Feast of Stephen.
The trouble with the day after Christmas, or indeed the day after anything, is precisely that. It’s the day after. It’s not the event itself. It’s no longer the excited build-up, the breathless anticipation, the hushed expectation. It’s the day when the Christmas Spirit has all been shared out and all that remains is the long, hangover-healing walk. It’s just the day after.
Except that it’s not. I’d argue (and it’s Christmas, so of course I’d argue) that in actual fact the day after is often the most important day of all.
I remember the day after my eldest, Miriam, was born, strapping her into the car seat in the hospital car park and being overwhelmed by the realisation that we were no longer alone. This extra person, suddenly here in our midst, was our responsibility and our home would now always be fuller, busier, noisier. Better.
Birth isn’t just the end of a pregnancy but the start of a life and afterwards nothing is ever the same.
And that’s the case with Christmas, because Christmas is not an end in itself. True, it is the culmination of the long wait of Advent and the much longer wait since the first playing of ‘All I want for Christmas is You’. But Christians believe, I believe, that the whole point of Christmas, is that it is a beginning. The birth of Jesus is the start of something, the start of a new way of thinking about the world and about each other.
And Boxing Day, the day after, is the day that all really kicks off.
So, when Good King Wenceslaus looks out on the Feast of Stephen, he doesn’t just go to walk off a hangover (well, it might have been that as well) but to do something that Jesus himself did: to look out for someone vulnerable, someone on the margins. Because that is the Christmas spirit.
And sharing the Christmas spirit isn’t what Christmas is for. Sharing the Christmas spirit is what Boxing Day is for. And the day after. And the day after that.
The picture is a detail of the Virgin and Child with Saints Michael and Wenceslaus, from an altarpiece of 1519, probably from Halle an der Saale, now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg.