Boxing Day!

Today is Boxing Day, the day when servants are given gifts and the day off from their employers, rewarding them for their faithful service, especially on Christmas Day, when they have to work serving their masters. Boxing Day is, in fact, an official holiday in the UK and the rest of the British Commonwealth.  I myself had no idea how many families in those countries still have such a large staff of servants that they need an official holiday to celebrate this event. I guess that Downton Abbey, the wildly successful PBS series, is not an exception, but the rule in the UK and it's former colonies.  Makes me wonder if we shouldn't have stuck with Great Britain after all. Our branch of the Hoyt family, by the way, were Tories, as was explained to my cousin Kathy, as she was unceremoniously thrown out of the Office of the Daughters of the American Revolution when she tried to join that organization.  Some people just never get over things like that.  What can I say?  And by the way, the photograph above is a still shot from the new Downton Abbey movie that I downloaded off the internet.  I did not, sadly enough, travel there over the holidays to take that photo.