Word: holidaying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...looking for something that explains the origins of Boxing Day, well, you're not going to find it here. The day-after-Christmas holiday is celebrated by most countries in the Commonwealth, but in a what-were-we-doing-again? bout of amnesia, none of them are really sure what they're celebrating, when it started...
...wait: there's another possible story about the holiday's origin. The day after Christmas was also the traditional day on which the aristocracy distributed presents (boxes) to servants and employees - a sort of institutionalized Christmas-bonus party. The servants returned home, opened their boxes and had a second Christmas on what became known as Boxing...
...which version is correct? Well, both. Or neither. No one, it seems, is really sure. Both the church boxes and the servant presents definitely existed, although historians disagree on which practice inspired the holiday. But Boxing Day's origins aren't especially important to modern-day Brits - Britain isn't known for its religious fervor, and few people can afford to have servants anymore, anyway. Today's Boxing Day festivities have very little to do with charity. Instead, they revolve around food, football (soccer), visits from friends, food and drinking...
...Meyers demonstrates, as she did in Something's Gotta Give and The Holiday, an extraordinarily limited worldview. Her heroines are allowed just one problem, and it will never, ever include a lack of taste. Jane's semi-rural Santa Barbara home is a hydroponic dreamland, where tomatoes grow implausibly round and fully ripe in springtime. Her spacious, beautiful kitchen is filled with shelves of cake plates and creamy white platters, just waiting for this formerly unappreciated domestic goddess to fill them with homemade bounty. Producers of porn employ "fluffers" on their sets. I believe Meyers, as a producer of lifestyle...
...course, in an impoverished nation where aid organizations provide food aid to some six million people, the Western notion of a gift-giving holiday does not translate very well, particularly after Kim Jong Il's regime effectively stripped most of the nation of any personal savings three weeks ago. Each year underground worshippers in North Korea receive an array of presents from the outside world, including foreign-made clothes and candy, smuggled in by defectors like Jeong...