BOXING DAY

Boxing day, or Saint Stephen’s day, is traditionally celebrated on December 26. Although there now seems to be a dispute as to the origins of Boxing day, I choose to believe the more Christian interpretation that it originated from the practice of giving presents to the less fortunate to commemorate Saint Stephen, one of seven men appointed by the apostles to take care of the church’s poorer members. Think “Good King Wenceslas”.

Sadly, boxing day has become more associated the world over with the infamous 2004 earthquake and tsunami, which is one of the reasons I write this piece, so as to help dispel the correlation of the day and the tragedy, which appears to be doomed to be remembered as the “Boxing Day Eathquake”.

Bad news aside, boxing day, while largely being ignored in the Philippines, took special significance for me this year.

My wife’s nephews had what was obviously a top of the line computer for its time, a Dell Optiplex 750Mhz that only had the basic goods. Gathering my old equipment, I managed to give them a 32 MB Nvidia Geforce PCI graphics accelerator (hard to find in this country) and an extra 320 MB of memory. I also installed a CD-RW drive my wife and I bought them for Christmas. Having the boys test it as soon as I delivered their upgraded PC, they jumped for joy when they saw how much faster their favorite game could run.

That it took so little effort to make them happy reminded me that it is much, much better to give than to receive. The feeling is priceless. This is a secret that is lost on too many of us, when we try to find happiness by taking what we can for ourselves, only to find that wanting can sometimes be much better than having. We ought to try giving more often.

Next year, I’m marking boxing day again.