Boxing Day 2016

Boxing Day seems to be catching on lately, or at any rate I see more references to it lately than I can remember seeing in previous years. Still, I doubt it will ever acquire the significance it has in Britain: St. Stephen's Day, the second of the famous twelve days of Christmas, on the way to Epiphany, on January 5th. In my own Christmas tradition, Boxing Day is the day I relax for a while and cast my mind back over the accomplishments and happenings of the previous year and look forward to the coming of the new year and my next birthday, which follows hard upon.

Once again I find myself remarking how quickly the year has gone, but that always seems to be the case when we look back in retrospect. My next thought is generally that little of note has happened, but not this time. This year was notable for us (J and me) for a number of reasons. First, I kicked things off by achieving 70 years, my allotted three score and ten, after which subsequent milestones should now be considered bonuses, not that any of us believes that's true. I had thought to have a big celebration, but then in consideration of the fact that many of my friends were achieving the same mark this year, we decided just to have one big party for the group of us, which we did on July 4th while we celebrated the nation's 240th, just to keep things in perspective.

Our other major milestone this year (J's and mine) was our 50th wedding anniversary. As noted, we generally don't go in for big celebrations, although for a while we'd got into the habit of spending a week at the beach in Rehoboth around that time. Since moving back to Texas, though, we seem to have abandoned that practice. So we gave some thought to renewing our beach tradition, but where to go? Then it came to us: Hawaii. We'd always wanted to go there, but had never been, so what better time to remedy that lapse. And since it was our 50th, well, why not go first class? So we did, all the way, a week in a luxury hotel on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu. Not surprisingly, we had a great time and no sooner got back than we began planning to return, either to Honolulu or to another of the islands. In fact, we have given some consideration to just moving there permanently, but that's still under discussion.

Christmas this year has been relatively quiet, as it often is for us. Nevertheless, we did manage a visit with some of our friends a couple of weeks prior to Christmas Day, and a modest Christmas Eve celebration with B, an old friend and neighbor who lives nearby in Lago Vista. Nor have we come to an end of our festivities. Two of our old friends whom we knew in Chicago and later in Washington, DC, will drop by later this week for a visit. Then a few days after that we'll join my brother and his wife for an early birthday lunch. By our standards, this is indeed a flurry of holiday activity. In fact, we've been so occupied with visits and watching football and basketball games, that we've neglected one of our abiding seasonal pastimes: watching scores of Christmas movies, but they are queued up and no doubt we will soon be making amends on that front.

As this year draws to a close, like many of our friends, we are in a state of shock over the results of the presidential election. But unlike some of them, J and I have in some respects embraced the madness; if we can't say we are looking forward with eager anticipation to what the new year will bring in that realm, we are more than curious to see what will unfold. One of my abiding interests, as I've written before, is the period (particularly in England and also in Germany) in the early part of the previous century, leading up to and then following the first world war. After reading many accounts of the way the world slid into madness and chaos, I've been intrigued by what it must have been like for those ordinary folks who were caught up in the insanity, but powerless to do anything to stop it. Now I'm getting some sense how they must have felt, something akin to watching an accident in slow motion, waiting for the inevitable collision, and hoping not to be struck by the flying debris.

At my age, there's not a lot more for me to do but watch and wait, so I hunker down and keep an eye on the weather, speaking of which, man ain't it strange. Here we were worrying about global warming, and now we can put that all aside and concentrate our attention on much more present concerns. One day soon we'll probably be looking back fondly on that time when all we had to fear were rising sea levels and mass extinctions. But so it goes. As I've said before, nothing stays the same. And next year I expect I'll have another list of things to look back on and forward to. I guess that's why I like Boxing Day. It helps me put things in perspective.