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# Posted 2:56 PM by Patrick Belton

TODAY IS ALSO BOXING DAY, also known in Britain and Ireland as St Stephen's Day. The origins of Boxing Day, as snopes points out, lie neither in a desire to rid the house of discarded boxes, nor in returning boxes of unwanted presents to the stores from whence they came, but instead derive from the Georgian and Victorian tradition of giving presents on St Stephen's Day to servants and tradespeople. Good King Wenceslas' gifts of meat, wine, and firewood, for example, were made to a poor man with the good fortune to struggle through the snow "on the Feast of Stephen." (Wenceslas, in turn, was a tenth century Bohemian duke assassinated by his rebellious brother en route to Mass, and thenceforth commemorated as a martyr. The familiar music dates all the way back to a 13th century hymn, "Tempus Adest Floridum," "Spring Has Unwrapped Her Flowers," a nice thought this time of the year....)

In Ireland, the feast of protomartyr St Stephen marks the day on which children traipse about from door to door collecting money to cover the burial expenses of a newly deceased bird, singing "The wren, the wren is the king of all birds / On St Stephen's Day, he got caught in the furze / So up with the kettle and down with the pan / And give us a penny for to bury the wren." (The day, in Irish, is known both as Lá le Stiofán and Lá an Dreoilín - the wren's day.) Wrens winged their way to a prominent role in druidic, perhaps even neolithic, ritual and augury. As the king of all birds, they were thought to be greater than even the eagle - because while an eagle could fly higher than all the other birds, a wren perched on an eagle's head could fly higher. (Hey, who said Bronze Age Celts didn't have a sense of humor?) Killing the wren on St Stephen's Day, in turn, could trace either to the Elizabethan idea of Christmastide Lord of Misrule, or the medieval Mumming tradition in which a champion of darkness was killed to bring life back to the world (i.e., the winter solstice; the wren, for its part, creeps along and inside stones, presumably also to include tombs).

So in a venerable English and Irish tradition, give us a penny, if you like, to bury the wren! Josh has some worthy causes here. Hey, David and I'll even sing for you!

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