Today is Boxing Day, the ritual whereby the English celebrate the invention of the box. No, it wasn’t St Stephen, we don’t know who, but today is the day. More traditional houses will have a room specifically set aside for worship – the Box Room. On normal days the lares are left to their own devices with perhaps just the occasional check to note that boxes still exist, that the Sun has not set upon the Empire. This, the day of worship, is celebrated with a familial game of sardines. Daily alcohol consumption rises to its annual peak as all attempt to drown the boredom of everyone using the same damn room to hide in.
St Stephen’s Day – stoned for telling the truth, a warning to politicians everywhere.
The Pilgrim Fathers landed at New Plymouth to provide our first proof that socialism, the forced communal ownership of agricultural and productive assets, does not work.
The Soviet Union’s parliament formally voted it out of existence – this won’t be the last proof that imposed socialism doesn’t work.
The Decembrist Uprising showed that authoritarianism doesn’t work all that well either
The first Kwanzaa is celebrated. An entirely made up festival so that blacks – as they were known in 1966, if not coloureds – would have a non-whitebread festival so as to not be part of the culture that so oppresses them.
Jimmy Hendrix wrote Purple Haze: