vat ist BOXING DAY?

(= official answer, weak if you ask me) (box = what yr prezzinx are put in)

Our BD party meant new food. They did GOOSE on the 25th ("You shit on my lawn, I'll eat you later, beeyatch!") and we had ham and turkey on the 26th with molto molto banzai trimmings and Xmas pudding, Battenberg cake and some kind of pie. Mmm. Then myself, Nellie (my best home friend from school, now a top civil servant) and her wildly-differing- in-age folks would lapse into food coma while in front of Monty Python.

I am just scum who lives NEAR Camberwell so my boxing day will consist of spam fritters. Oh, and I'll be oop North anyway. Oh dear. This reminds me I've not booked tickets home yet. Ach.

Her dad is the guy who invented the Teasmade and medical ultrasound for cancer detection. He got his first patent when he was 14. The ultrasound has put him on the map, he's won the Japan Prize for Science and could win the Nobel Prize too, it's been mooted. He's 87, did medicine at Downing College between the wars and tells us priceless stories about removing beer bottles from soldiers' arses at New End Hospital in WWII. We were at her cousins' house in Chiswick (big Norman Shaw pile) and found all the deeds for South London in an attic chest one day, it was freaky.

They lived in my road because of catchment areas. Despite pedigree and deeds to Sarf London, they were non-materialist and not proper wealthy (despite big lawsuit win in defamation case that was in Guinness Book Of World Records). Dr Wild likes to tinker with Alvis cars and is the original excruciating DIY eker-outer. Big on NHS but came to US in late 40s to do cancer research for U of M, thinks Thatcher is common and evil. Nellie's mum is a library science PhD and Wife Three. I'm absolutely besotted with all of them.

So, my parents always maintained that if the 26th was a Sunday (as it is this year) Boxing Day was moved to the next Monday. This seems to be a ye olden days thing which has fallen by the wayside, but it is still sort of doing my head in as I am looking at an invitation to a "Boxing Day Buffet" with no date specified and would like not to a) turn up on the wrong day or b) ring up and ask any confusing and pedantic questions.

Do I just assume that this means nothing to anyone except my parents and whoever edited Wikipedia to say the same thing*, and everyone else is happily planning their Boxing Day for the 26th?

* surely not my parents, who have still not mastered the art of reading a text message, never mind editing Wikipedia

i thought it was just the bank-holiday-ness of Boxing Day that got shifted over on to the following Monday?

(but only if it falls on a sunday, or, wait, maybe a saturday too)

Calender here says that Sunday is St. Stephens, Monday is a Bank Holiday, and Tuesday is Boxing Day.

it's the day you go round someone's house, eat and drink till there's nothing left, say thanks and leave.