Boxing Day: Shopping and Snow

So Black Friday is just starting to find its way to the UK.  It makes some sense because they don't celebrate Thanksgiving.  As a result, there is no holiday, and most people are working.  However, the day after Christmas is HUGE in the UK.  It is known as Boxing Day.  I originally thought that this was because everyone is in fact boxing up all their Christmas items.  Thankfully, Wikipedia saved me from making this terrible American assumption.  Boxing Day is actually based on the following tradition from the 1800s:

The earliest attestations of the term as being from England in the 1830s, defining it as 'the first week-day after Christmas-day, observed as a holiday on which post-men, errand-boys, and servants of various kinds expect to receive a Christmas-box'.^[4]

The term Christmas-box, meanwhile, dates back to the seventeenth century, and amongst other things meant

A present or gratuity given at Christmas: in Great Britain, usually confined to gratuities given to those who are supposed to have a vague claim upon the donor for services rendered to him as one of the general public by whom they are employed and paid, or as a customer of their legal employer; the undefined theory being that as they have done offices for this person, for which he has not directly paid them, some direct acknowledgement is becoming at Christmas.^[5]

So today it looks more like the picture above.  Everyone seems to be gifting themselves and not the postman.  Long story short, I thought I would partake in this tradition.  Only to find that this is when the expert shoppers of the world show up to play their "A" game.  This was the "queue" that formed outside a very popular and often expensive store here in the UK that was rumored to have 50% of their entire store. Yes that is just for one store. Things sell out so quickly in the UK.  To give you an idea, I was there 30 minutes after the store opened, and there were only 5 items on the 5-6 year old rack.  This store is similar to a Gymboree.  When has that ever happened in the States?  That was only the beginning of the crowds.  By 1 p.m. I could barely move in most stores.  I opted to head home and walked out into a blanket of snow.

Back at home, Sierra and Zach had built quite an adorable snowman if I may say so myself.  He was, of course, dubbed Olaf and there was a lot of "Do you want to build a snowman?"  sung around our house that night.