Ye who now will bless the poor
Shall yourselves find blessing.

Yesterday was the Feast of St. Stephen, on which I for one would rather sing of King Wenceslas than think of the story of the ancient martyr whose suffering is a prelude to the conversion of St. Paul. It was also boxing day, the day when the British aristocracy traditionally gave boxes of gifts and food to their servants and allowed them the day off to celebrate Christmas. British tradesmen, too, sometimes made up Christmas boxes for their employees. Samuel Pepys’ entry for 19 December 1663 notes that he went “by coach to my shoemaker’s and paid all there, and gave something to the boys’ box against Christmas.” Perhaps such boxes carried on the custom of collecting alms for St. Stephen’s day in boxes outside churches.

Today Boxing Day is a secular holiday when Banks are closed in Great Britain; though the holiday is not uniformly observed throughout the former British colonies and doesn’t always fall on 26 December. Still, in general terms Boxing Day is the day after Christmas Day, the second day of Christmastide which ends twelve days later. Christmas and Epiphany sometimes overlap. The day of the Epiphany should fall immediately after Twelfth Night, but it doesn’t at all times and in all places, the Roman, British, and Orthodox calendars being different in some respects. What unites these practices is what the old carol calls ‘blessing the poor,’ something we may have to think about in more complicated ways than our ancestors did.

We live in a time when democracy and citizenship are on the wane. Traditional philanthropies survive, but the popularity of the prosperity gospel is alarming. Moreover, our new olilgarchs are not characterized by the noblesse oblige symbolized by King Wenceslas in the carol. Indeed their setbacks in the recent election seem to have emboldened them to still greedier amour propre. Gil Schwartz, AKA Stanley Bing, has written a best-selling series of books and columns over the past ten years or so that can be read either as satire or as advice on how to succeed in the climate of corporate decadence we seem to be experiencing. What Would Machiavelli Do? The Ends Justify the Meanness may be his catchiest title. The bottom line: love yourself. Schwartz/Bing has so much fun being a cynic that it’s easier to to think of him as Dr. Phil than as Jonathan Swift.

E. M. Forster’s narrator observes at the beginning of chapter six of Howard’s End, that “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.” It does no disrespect to the tragedies we number in our twenty-first century landscape to say that the tragedy of poverty is not among them. Like Forster’s gentlefolk, authentic or pretending, we have lost the ability to empathize with grinding poverty, and our indifference seems to grow in proportion to the growth of economic inequality as more and more former members of the middle class are forced into unthinkability. Indeed, a cursory survey of articles about income inequality over the past three decades suggests that our major concern is not the human tragedy but economic growth, to which the poor in their burgeoning numbers seem irrelevant.

But it isn’t just poverty to which we are indifferent. Many of us are also vehemently opposed to the traditional rights of workers. The State of Michigan, in a lame duck legislative session, has just enacted a right to work law (so called) over the protests of unions. Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio remain sites of conflict over workers’ rights. McDonald’s has just joined a growing network of companies who put profit ahead of decent working conditions for the masses who labor in company and franchise kitchens, as the scandal of worker casualization grows in the food service industry and in big box stores. Who cares about the Fordist bargain when the growth of third-world markets seems open ended and when the market for labor at home seems assured to be a buyer’s market for the indefinite future?

Class warfare, you say? Perhaps we might return to King Wenceslas. The radical, Christian message for Christmastide is the extension of good will to all mortality. The child in the manger grew up to be Jesus who would share a meal with anyone. The prince of peace was also the lover of all souls, especially those of the poor. This is what Nietzsche hated about Christianity, its radical democracy, its ressentiment, its vision of a just and equal world. We celebrate these things at Christmastide, whether we like it or not.