Boxing Day

Today is Boxing Day, celebrated the day after Christmas in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and other Commonwealth countries.

Boxing Day was the setting for the short story "Reginald's Christmas Revel," by British writer Saki. (books by this author) Saki is the pen name for Hector Hugh Munro, a writer best known for his witty and delightfully absurd satirical short stories.

The sardonic narrator of Saki's story sits through a boring holiday meal, in which a dull sportsman dominates the dinner table conversation with descriptions of wild game he's caught. Finally, the ennui is relieved when they move into the drawing room for parlor games. Says the narrator: "It was in the evening that we cast aside the cares and distractions of the day and really lived."

He sits through the inanity as decently as he can, and then, he reports, "in a lapse of good-nature, I consented to masquerade as a book, only I warned them that it would take some time to carry out." He's gone for 40 minutes; during that whole time, the guests are eagerly expecting him to appear any moment masquerading as a book. They're mad he doesn't come back to the parlor, and he reports, not "a bit pacified when I told them afterwards that I wasAt the end of the passage."

That game's over, and the evening entertainment continues with storytelling and mind-reading, which the narrator doesn't want to participate in, so he invents a headache and retires from the scene. But first he walks by the room of one of the other dinner guests, who'd retired even earlier in the evening than he, a "rather formidable lady" who had put a signed note up on her bedroom door asking that she be awakened early in the morning. The sardonic narrator sees the sign and observes: "Such an opportunity does not come twice in a lifetime." He replaces her wake-up request with a suicide note, and keeps her signature from the original note prominently showing. He goes out into the hall and pops a bag filled with air to make a huge explosive sound, and he gives a loud stage moan which can be heard all through out the house. And then, he narrates, "I pursued my original intention and went to bed. The noise those people made in forcing open the good lady's door was positively indecorous; she resisted gallantly, but I believe they searched her for bullets for about a quarter of an hour, as if she had been a historic battlefield."

The narrator concludes, "I hate travelling on Boxing Day, but one must occasionally do things that one dislikes."