If I were to take down the boxes from my Boxing Day store cupboard I would find days infused with a sense of made-up family, the collection of faux family for migrants set adrift on the other side of the world from their geneology, or in the case of one set of Boxing Day Family, set adrift on the other side of the ditch.
The dad of the house cutting into the leftover turkey, passing plates down tables cobbled together – finishing with the small legs gathered round the table of last resort – the card table. For the second day running tissue paper hats taking up residence, at least in the first instance on heads and only latterly, as the afternoon wore on, slipping down and eye holes being ripped out so that Boxing Day monsters could crawl round the playroom. And of course, dreadful Christmas Cracker Jokes – it makes you wonder just what the selection criteria was for the writers.
There was an occasional jack-in-the-box surprise of a clan gathering. The burnt grass of the reserve across the road from my Nana’s place looms large in my memory. A slight edge of anxiety creeping out of that box – will I catch the wretched ball launched off the pride-and-joy Grey Nichol that appeared under the sibling tree the day before?
And, of course, the cricket. The overwhelming feature of Boxing Day in my Australian childhood of the seventies. And as much as I dislike cricket (I know, take my passport from me now) I prefer it to the capitalist colonisation of Boxing Day that flashes on the evening news now.
The Boxing Day Test. An isolation from community. As my brother grew older he would be packed off to the G with turkey and ham sandwiches, his bona fides as an Australian there for all to see. And I would wonder through the day, seeking refuge in rooms without radios and televisions.
For three years there was respite. The Lord of the Rings trilogy gave me a Boxing Day crew and ritual. Gingerbread from the tin from home and all-you-can eat popcorn and soft drink in the comfy chairs of the slightly more upmarket part of the cinema. Not too much of the all-you-can-eat though – the delicate balance of bladder to movie length ratios always at the front of the mind.
But then I moved into my own house. And I found a new way to spend Boxing Day. By myself. Keeping company with my pyjamas, the roster of Boxing Day announcers on RRR, and the glories of a read-in-a-day novel. The joy of reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, tears coursing down my cheek, small smiles of gladness, and the deep, abiding sense of happiness that comes from reading a novel that traverses the horror and beauty of the world we live in. Aided of course by the rule that Boxing Day breakfast is legitimately cranberry-white chocolate-pecan cookies – the addition of oats making them as close to muesli as any girl could hope for – and the chocolates received on Christmas Day.
And a gradual dawning of gratitude for the space that this solitary Boxing Day has come to occupy in my life. At at time of year which can be difficult for those who have not followed the road to nuclear familydom I have stumbled into ritual for a day that is about family – real or made-up.
And my made-up family for Boxing Day is the chair that my Papa sat in, which sits now in the corner of my house next to the standard lamp stand that my father made me. And I am nourished by the Christmas cooking, the cookies that I have made with my fake-god-kids and the mince pies that my I have baked with my mother, sister-in-law and nieces, and the leftovers from the family feast of the day prior. And myself, in my open-hearted, abiding-love-of-sweet-food, tickle-my-brain-with-a-good-book, way.
Boxing Day, 2014
Stardust Becoming 