Boxing Day

Christmas services, celebrations, dinners are ended and today is hopefully a day of some rest for one and all.  I love the Boxing Day tradition of First Footing that my family practised for many years.  Apparently good luck was yours for the new year if your first Boxing Day visitor was a dark haired man bearing gifts.  We had a Scottish family friend that would arrive fairly early each Boxing Day morning with gifts for all of us, and my dad would do a few rounds of visiting to some of our single friends after that, bearing boxes of mom's good holiday baking.  For me as a child it eased the post-Christmas present opening let down.  A little treat to open Christmas Eve after church, the  massive blow out of parcels Christmas Day, and then our friend's little gifts Boxing Day morning.  Turkey leftovers all day and then a week of turkey pot pies and creamed turkey on toast made for a wonderful week leading up to New Years Eve.  My parents nearly always went to parties then.  Dad would wear a a fancy sport coat or suit and mom would put on her newest little black dress with simple flashing diamond pins or broaches and a new lipstick.  I often was toted along as our main babysitters were family friends who attended the same parties.  If it wasn't too late when we arrived I was allowed to participate in some of the games, or at least watch the adults playing card games and charades and drinking pretty cocktails and eating finger food snacks.  My best fun was being put to bed at the hosts' houses where I got to fall asleep in the middle of large beds, surrounded by the guests' fancy fur coats.  Ooh, it was lovely.  Good memories!