Christmas Day/Boxing Day

Boxing Day is a British holiday that follows Christmas. There are a couple possible origins for the holiday. The one I like is that it is the day off work for English workers who had to work on Christmas catering to the parties of the upper classes. After the celebration of Christmas, the wealthy gave boxes of gifts and the day off to their workers.

In England it is still a day when you give gifts to people that assist you through out the year, like your mailman, or doorman, or bartender. I did not get anything.

We spent Christmas day just hanging around the house. Dinah and PJ came over for dinner. I was able to find a turkey, so we had this and three kinds of potatoes. MMMM.
I told someone last night that we did not do anything on Christams day. But on reflection we opened gifts, watched Batman Begins at 9:00am, cooked an entire Christmas dinner, Denzel came over, Dinah and PJ came to play a seven player game of Bang (an Italian card game that Dinah brought and that Davis wants to play all the time), ate dinner, played Bang again, the Harrison's of the North came over for deserts, and then we finished the day by watching Batman: The Dark Night. I guess the day was kind of full.

Boxing Day is a national holiday here, therefore it is a day off for museum staff. There was a cruise ship in so all of us came in to open the museum. The Harrisons came to use the internet, Denzel came with us, Kenlove came to be Kenlove. Another full house.

A gentleman and his daughter came by to ask about the old military bases here. He had worked at the missle tracking station in teh late 1960s and wanted to know if it still existed. I took him around and we looked at some of the standing buildings and some of the ruins.
In the evening, Allesio organized a Boxing Day jam session at the SandBar. We played, Mitch joined us, Kel came to play percussion, and a diver who teaches jazz at the New School in New York joined on the keyboard. Martin is getting good enough on the bass that he can just pick up and play. I wish he was here all the time. It was a party.

We played until the rain came at 11:00. The only other damper to the evening was that this was alos the goign away party for Edgar and Dikla. I probably have not written about them, but they ran the Bruno Art Gallery in the Cruise Center and we have been hanging out since the hurricane. They leave tomorrow.