Boxing Day

This is the day when one visits friends, goes for a drive or a long walk or just sits around recovering from too much food - everything to eat is cold. In the country there are usually Boxing Day Meets (hunts - fox-hunting).

In the big cities and towns, tradition on that day demands a visit to the pantomime, where once again one is entertained by the story of Cinderella, Dick Whittington^* Puss in Boots or whoever it may be - the story being protracted and elaborated into as many spectacular scenes as the producer thinks one can take at a sitting.

^* (Dick Whittington and His Cat - a 16th-century folk tale of a poor country boy who came to London to seek his fortune and to whom the bells of Bow Church sang that he would be Lord Mayor of London three times; the story is based on the fact that Richard Whittington (b. 1423) was Lord Mayor of London three times, but this Whittington was the son of a Gloucestershire knight and a prosperous London mercer.)