“Season’s Greetings” isn’t always a tepid or politically correct alternative to “Merry Christmas.” Sometimes, it’s a reminder that Christmas is indeed a season, not a single, sometimes slightly frantic day.

Welcome to Boxing Day or St. Stephen’s Day, the Second Day of Christmas!

There are at least 12 Days of Christmas. The celebrations start with Christmas Day or, strictly speaking, Christmas Eve, after the sun goes down, with a traditional Vigil supper. They carry on all the way to Epiphany, commemorating the Adoration of the Magi, who brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the infant Jesus shortly after His birth.

BOXING DAY.

The first post-Christmas day to mark in your calendar is December 26, Boxing Day. Popular in America’s mother country of Great Britain, it hasn’t quite caught on stateside yet, despite Massachusetts designating it a holiday in the mid-’90s.

Its exact origins are obscure: it may take its name from the alms collected for the needy from church poor boxes in days gone by, or it may take its name from the Christmas boxes the wealthy would gift to housemaids, tradesmen, and others as a thank you for their hard work through the year, sometimes including Christmas Day.

Either way, it is a day where the emphasis is firmly on giving: you give on Christmas Day, yes, but you also receive. Boxing Day, while taken over to a great extent by post-Christmas sales in our all too commercial, secular age, is a time to reflect with gratitude on what we have and to consider how we might lift up others.

ST. STEPHEN.

A December 26 holiday with roots even older and deeper than Boxing Day is the Feast of Saint Stephen.

Protestant Christians are not always as comfortable with celebrating saints as Catholic and Orthodox Christians, but St. Stephen’s bona fides are impeccable. We know of him from the New Testament, specifically the Book of Acts, as the first recorded martyr.

Rather than giving his money or his time to good causes, St. Stephen gave his life. Dragged before the same council that condemned Christ in Jerusalem for his supposed blasphemy, St. Stephen stood strong for his faith, declaring to the assembled priests and elders, “Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? And they have slain them who foretold the coming of the Just One, of whom you now have become the betrayers and murderers.”

He was dragged from the temple then, and from Jerusalem, and stoned to death outside the city. But as he died, he was Christ-like, praying, “Lord, charge them not with this sin,” just as the Lord prayed, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” from the Cross.

Perhaps a bit of a heavy story for younger children at Christmastime, but for adults and teenagers, it is a story of self-sacrifice well worth reflecting on heading into a new that promises to be full of challenges.

The Third Day of Christmas, which we will discuss tomorrow, is far more cheerful. Happy Boxing Day!