I’d idly wondered all my life, but never bothered to look it up. Turns out there doesn’t seem to be one clear accepted origin of Boxing Day, but the general premise goes that on or before Christmas Day people would give gifts to people of the same social level or class. On what used to be the first weekday after Christmas, but is now the day after Christmas Day, upper social classes would, in some form, give gifts to those in lower classes — often a Christmas box. This might have been because they had worked for them during the year in one way or another, like giving a Christmas tip to the milkman, or simply as a gift, or because the lower classes were too busy serving the upper classes on Christmas Day and so couldn’t do the Christmas thing properly themselves.

As is often the case, the Snopes article about Boxing Day, has a useful synthesis.

Origins of Boxing Day

Did you you know, a rubber duck can help you solve your problem? Or, a teddy bear, or, heck, a table, whatever. Have you ever been called over to someone’s desk to help them solve a problem, and as they explain what they were doing to you they figure out the answer themselves?

Rubberducking is the simple technique of explaining your code, or whatever you’re working on, to a rubber duck, and, in the process of explaining it, finding the answer yourself. Rubberduck debugging is a term in software development as the process of figuring out a solution to a bug or problem. Surprisingly effective, and way cheaper than hiring a contractor for the day.

Rubberducking

A word from the Sami people of Northern Norway, Finland or Sweden, from ‘coffee’ and ‘boil’, used as a measure of distance for how far you can go before you need a cup of coffee.

Kaffikok