Happy Boxing Day/Kwanzaa/Mao's Birthday/December 26th/Post-Christmas Delirium Day!

Happy December 26th! Or, Happy Kwanzaa! Or, Happy Boxing Day! Or, Happy Slovenian Independence and Unity Day!

Everyone who thought “the day after Christmas” was enough to describe this last Saturday of 2015 is CRAZY. The world does not only consist of large trees beginning to wilt and wrapping paper strewn haphazardly across homes. People have their pick of things to celebrate.

It’s the first day of Kwanzaa, of course. 2015 actually marks the 50th anniversary of the birth of the holiday. As ever, some white people are oddly perturbed about the existence of Kwanzaa—this guy seems to think it’s some weird threat to the supremacy of Christmas?—but Sesame Street knows what’s up.

It’s also Boxing Day, which does not actually celebrate boxing, but rather—well, the AP says that actually nobody knows where it comes from but it might have something to do with the “Christmas box” that rich British people used to give their servants. It’s like celebrating “Downton Abbey” but Maggie Smith’s only around if you know her and see her on Boxing Day! Also, there are lots of sales going on.

The caption on the photo below reads, “Two boggans fighting each other during the traditional Boxing Day ceremony at Haxey in Lincolnshire,” so do with that what you will.

But wait! There’s more. December 26th is also:

• The aforementioned Slovenian Independence and Unity Day, held to mark Slovenia’s 1990 independence referendum.
• The feast day of Abadiu of Antinoe, a saint in the Coptic Christian Church. The Daily Californian took the trouble to ask a Coptic priest about St. Abadiu, and reported that information about him was “scarce.”
• Mummer’s Day, a holiday in Cornwall, England, which used to be fine and then turned super-racist.

But wait! There’s even more! December 26th is also the birthday of Mao Tse-Tung, who was a pretty big deal, and of novelist Henry Miller, and it’s also the day when Jack Johnson became the first black heavyweight champion of the world, which would have been exceptionally appropriate if Boxing Day was about boxing, but it isn’t, so it was just an important historical milestone instead.