Well now, it’s Boxing day (do Americans have boxing day?) the day after Christmas, so called because all the kids found out what their friends had got for Christmas pressies and gave them a sock in the jib… hey I make up stuff for a living. It’s a more interesting theory than some to do with boxes… And here in Palazzo di Monkey (temp’ry) as we’re moving house out to a place called Nangetty (and no one can tell me why or what it means — they just say ‘be afraid. Be verrrrrry verrrrrrrrrry afraid’ and smirk a lot) it’s boxing day too. Or putting into boxes day… I was doing my study (aka ‘office’) this morning prior to another lovely day of scrubbing and sanding floors – That is why we pay writers so well and often, so they can scrub floors instead of writing. Heaven help us if they wrote more we’d have to read more. The hardship… yes, I _am_ in an odd mood tonight. Which has a lot more to do with the books I am packing up. Yes, I have too many. Yes I have read all of them, many a lot of times.
Some I have not read for years.
Some distracted me even while packing them up (I now have a separate box of to be re-reads. I came across Madelaine L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time. Several of the Van Vogt’s where the writing irritated me, but the story and ideas were fascinating…
And one thing I realized, is that my reading tastes do not fit well into boxes. Not even in Non-fiction. From Astronomy to Zoology – with rather a lot of recipe books and books on fly-tying. Is this normal? Is this just writers? Is this just Hanuman-behavior? Is this just a belief of traditional publishing?
Tell me about boxes.
Mad Genius Club 
12 responses to “Boxing day”
Boxes. Lessons Learned this year.
(1) Don’t bother trying to wrap a chainsaw. Even the manufacturer leaves the blade sticking out of the box.
(2) When you don’t hear the delivery man knocking, just find the large heavy boxes leaning against the tail gate of your truck in the driveway, expect the tinkle of broken glass when you try to move them. Not that I blame him, Christmas deliveries must involve overtime dealing with one stressed out customer after another. And the damage to the box looked like forklift, not dropped-by-driver.
(3) Awesomely fast delivery of replacement parts can occur just before Xmas.
(4) When boxing books, label at least two sides of every box, so they can be slightly more easily identified if not unpacked immediately. I have boxes that are still packed from moving here twenty five years ago. That I occasionally raid for a suddenly remembered old favorite.
I had boxes that were still “packed” even after several moves.
Of some things I’ve had that. Not books.
Yeah, book boxes normally got unpacked and repacked. When I didn’t have room on my shelves, I’d keep some in boxes. One nice thing about computers is that I have lists of my books both on shelf, on my computer (ebooks) and in storage. I tried to list which books were in which box. Didn’t always work. [Grin]
Grin, wrapping chainsaws is sort of what I do all the time in writing. The labels thing is a good point, as I am going to be losing about 8 shelves of book-case (part of the house we move from), but otherwise, seriously that is the one thing we always unpack. Moves have got further apart (our last two were 7 and 8 years apart) but before that…
It’s going to take a few days to make a book case – my woodworking tools need to get accessible first.
Boxing Day doesn’t take place in the US.
Of course, since it started as a day when the Gentry/Nobility gave special gifts to their servants and very few of the Gentry/Nobility came to America, it’s not surprising that we “forgot” to add it to our list of holidays. [Smile]
As a kid no one could ever tell me why it was called ‘Boxing’ day. So I made up a slew of theories, including a number involving the sport of boxing.
According to what I’ve read, nobody’s sure of *why* it’s called “Boxing Day” but the origin of it as being a day when the “upperclass gave to the lowerclass” seems to be accepted.
http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/boxingday.asp
I guess it was typical of someone who would become a sf/fantasy writer that I 1)needed answers. 2)Made up good stories if I couldn’t get them.
Well, wanting to know “why” is fairly common so lots of people “make up” stories when nobody knows “why”. [Smile]
Boxing Day is great, 2 days off for most people. It’s also the polite version of Black Friday, at least in Canada.
Boxes are great ways to disguise gifts. It took a few years but now all our friends and family know, ” Never Trust The Box.”
For storage I prefer plastic bins to boxes especially for books. They’re alot more waterproof if the basement floods in the spring.
Have to agree about the plastic bins – but in this case it’s more move from one book-case in one house, to the same book-case (I think we have 15 now) in the next house, about 20 km away. We’ve got another 3 weeks to move out there so it’s happening in stages, taking ute (truck) loads of small stuff across as we try to fix / make habitable the old farmhouse before moving in. We’ve used a friend’s elderly asthmatic Bedford for our big furniture, which is now filling the shed there, and being moved in as we finish the painting of floors and sanding and varnishing of walls or something like that.