I must say, my father was always very generous with gifts at Christmas… He just didn’t have the best talent at picking out anything any of us liked! By the time my sisters and I were all out of elementary school, it was an established tradition for my dad to buy us the tackiest school clothes he could find with the understanding that we would exchange them on Boxing Day and buy something we really liked. He was particularly good at picking out particularly bad clothes for my mom! I haven’t been home for Christmas in six years, so I should ask my mom if the tradition is still alive and well.
I’m not sure if it’s a traditon that will be carried through the generations. We’ll wait and see when my daughter is older how impressed she is with the gifts I choose for her!
Wake Up and Laugh! 
Is that frost on those coins? Brrrrrrrrrr!
Thank you for a great Boxing Day picture and story!
Thanks Marcus,
It must be nice living in a place where frost is an intellectual concept! haha!
Happy Holidays!
“It must be nice living in a place were frost is an intellectual concept!”
Lol!
(Btw, I think the odds of a father picking out clothing that would impress a teenage daugher are pretty slim!)
I was just thinking about Boxing Day, and what a wonderful tradition that is.
For those of you who might not be familiar with this, it was the day after Christmas, when, having received lots of new stuff, you took the older things you that you no longer needed, and boxed them up to give to those less fortunate than yourself. So one day you receive something, and the next you give something. There’s a symmetry about it that seems very nice.
Btw, I also saw the Jijang exhibit at Jogye Temple. It was okay, with some very nice taenghwa (paintings on cloth), and some okay statues, but mostly it was about the different levels of hells! So there was the Hell of being squished flat, the Hell of having your tounge plowed, the hell of boiling water, etc.
I think they were saying that beings progressed through these every seven days, hence the reason people hold a ceremony every 7 days after someone has died, until finally the 49th day ceremony. I’m not quite sure how to view this; Daehaeng Sunim has never said anything even close to this (that I’ve heard of). So I wonder if the structure is something added to give it a bit of story-telling pizzaz.
Happy Boxing, Everyone! Every six months we go through our cupboards and give away anything we haven’t used for two years. Today Frank and I made a Box run with a bag full of winter jackets and …. insulated coffee mugs! Funny what we horde!
Joseph, even mothers can’t get clothing right for our kids… No matter what kind of sweater I get for Alex each year, she calls it her “Weasley sweater” (after the Harry Potter character Ron who got odd-shaped sweaters his mother knitted for him).