I’M WRITING this on Boxing Day 2025, an official holiday in the United Kingdom and many other countries, especially those such as Canada and Australia which once formed the British Empire, but it is not always called Boxing Day. In European countries, and those unfortunate parts of the world that remained untouched by the civilising hand of British imperialism, it is often known as ‘Second Christmas Day’, ‘Zweiter Weihnachtsfeiertag’ in German, or in French the more mellifluous ‘Le lendemain de Noël’.
The day after Christmas is also, of course, the feast day of Saint Stephen, recognised throughout the Christian world as the first Christian martyr, stoned to death in Jerusalem around AD 34 for blasphemy against the Jewish religion, and whose execution was apparently witnessed by the Apostle Paul.
When I think of Boxing Day as I experienced it growing up on the south coast of England, I recall devouring copious amounts of cold turkey and stuffing, not to mention the seemingly endless stream of sweets that usually lasted well beyond New Year’s Day; watching old films on television and footage of hunt saboteurs trying to prevent posh people in their ‘pursuit of the uneatable’ fox; and what seem in retrospect to have been magical afternoon walks with my father to a nearby Anglican church, a magnificent Grade II listed building modelled on the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi in Italy and built around 1930 in the Romanesque architectural style. In those days, Catholics were not encouraged to attend Protestant services, but entering a beautiful church that was empty at the time and admiring the beauty of its Nutcracker-sized Christmas tree and some of the largest figurines I have ever seen was not forbidden. Besides, the church in question espoused the highest form of Anglicanism then permitted, and even boasted a contingent of wonderfully friendly Anglican nuns, all of which helped salve the Jansenist conscience of my pre-Vatican II Irish father.
Sadly, Boxing Day is virtually unknown in the United States and is not a recognised holiday. Still, it continues to be celebrated by the odd ageing expatriate such as myself and my anglophile American-born wife. But most Americans, and I say this as someone whose first job after arriving in the United States was selling home furnishings in a department store, spend the day (if they don’t have to work) wandering around shopping malls looking for bargains and returning or exchanging gifts they don’t like or are the wrong size.
Ah, but all is not lost: December 26 is now the first day of Kwanzaa, ‘a week-long holiday celebrating African American and Pan-African heritage, unity, and community’. Created in 1966 during the aftermath of the violent rioting centred on the Watts district of Los Angeles that left 34 dead, it was intended to bring about healing and foster a sense of shared history and tradition among black Americans.
While it is now widely recognised by government agencies, including stamps issued by the US Post Office, official announcements from the White House, and is featured on Hallmark cards and on almost every calendar one cares to check, I have never come across anyone who celebrates Kwanzaa, although Wikipedia informs me that ‘a 2009 estimate placed the number of Americans who celebrate Kwanzaa between 500,000 and 2,000,000’. Not that I go around asking random black people if they celebrate the holiday. But Kwanzaa seems to be one of those holidays that enjoys a high profile and official recognition, but is noticeable by its absence in the lives of the vast majority of ordinary people, black or otherwise. For most Americans, the only experience of Kwanzaa comes in 1st grade when their woke white teacher has them learn songs in poorly translated Swahili and teaches them how to drum.
If I am honest, Kwanzaa has become a bit of joke, its mention eliciting sarcasm and laughter even, I am told, among American blacks, most of whom are Christian and celebrate Christmas. Not that Kwanzaa is a religious holiday, mind you, and people of all faiths or none at all are permitted to honour it as they choose, at least theoretically.
Before I finish, allow me to say a few words about the origins of this strange made-up secular holiday that few people know anything about and acknowledge it only in order not to seem ‘racist’. When it comes to current understanding, provenance is often key.
Kwanzaa, a Swahili word meaning ‘first fruits’, was created in 1966 by a self-described Marxist called Ronald McKinley Everett. He intended the invented holiday to take place on Christmas Day and take the focus off the birth of Christ and focus instead on celebrating black identity and culture. Despite its use of Swahili, a lingua franca spoken in East Africa, Kwanzaa has little or nothing to do with Africa or Africans, a fact to which its founder even conceded: ‘People think it’s African’, he admitted, ‘but it’s not’.
Such cynical honesty should be admired, I suppose, but Everett, now 84 and calling himself Maulana Karenga, went a step further when he explained in a 1971 interview that he ‘wanted to give black people a holiday of their own . . . and said it was African because black people in this country wouldn’t celebrate it if they knew it was American’. When it failed to displace Christmas in the hearts of black Americans, he moved its beginning from Christmas Day to the day after.
Karenga, a violent black nationalist who was sentenced in 1971 to up to ten years in prison for imprisoning two women and torturing them by whipping them with electrical cords, a hot soldering iron, and by putting detergent and running hoses in their mouths, made no secret of what he intended Kwanzaa to achieve: To offer black Americans ‘a cultural and ideological alternative to Christmas, particularly one that rejected Christian themes and teachings’. Indeed, Karenga openly dismissed Christianity altogether, urging blacks to reject it as a ‘White’ religion and European, and calling Jesus a ‘psychotic’.
Fortunately, the popularity of Kwanzaa has declined considerably since the 1990s. Few black Americans celebrate it and few ever did. Despite continuing official lip service, and affluent white liberals using it as an opportunity to signal their virtue, let us hope that this racially divisive and anti-Christian pseudo holiday will soon be relegated to the dustbin of history, where it surely belongs.
