Have the merriest Boxing Day

Today is December 26th, and in Canada and the United Kingdom, this is known as Boxing Day. While you might think this has something to do with drunken brawling -- and perhaps for some it does, everybody celebrates the season in their own way -- it is to do with the time-honored (and largely ignored these days) practice of giving gifts or gratuities to those who have served you during the year. That is, you put the gifts in a 'box' along with some fancy foodstuffs, and so forth.

I say it is largely ignored nowadays for a number of reasons. We don't get mail delivered to our door, but to a box at the end of the block and, anyway, screw the mailman, he makes more than I did on a good year. He should be giving me a box. And, our garbagemen have good union jobs, too. I like to give charity to those who actually need whatever beneficence I can bestow.

Anyway, the 26th has dawned brightly and the Glacier (shown) is looking all winter wonderlandish, and as long as the snow is up there rather than down here, I am content.

Otherwise, how was your Christmas? Mine was OK. Actually I was feeling like crap since the cold I was dealing with last week turned into a nicely full-blown sinus infection. So, I started on antibiotics this morning and hopefully that will slap me back into shape. But, sinuses notwithstanding, it was all quite nice. It was also quiet and unchallenging, but with good food (what little I could actually taste), nice music and general laziness.

We got each other things we actually wanted and could use. Griffin, meanwhile, has developed a Christmas tree fetish and is now choosing to lie under it full-time.

A Christmas Carol was viewed, and A Child's Christmas in Wales was listened to, and I also read an article in Vanity Fair in which Angie Dickinson wouldn't come clean about whether she actually had an affair with JFK. But, since everybody else of note did, why not her?

Anyway, that's about all for now and I am only delighted that I have no impulse to go out to the Boxing Day sales -- I forgot to mention that is what Boxing Day is truly about in contemporary Canada. BD is the equivalent of the American Black Friday after Thanksgiving. For me, anything I really want I can't afford, and anything I can afford, I don't really want.

So, Happy 26th. Anticlimaxes can be better than climaxes if you work it right.