What is "Boxing Day" and how did it originate?  Despite the lively images suggested by the name, it has nothing to do with pugilistic expositions between tanked-up family members who have dearly been looking forward to taking a round out of each other for the past year. Likewise, it does not gain its name from the overpowering need to rid the house of an excess of wrappings and mountains of now useless cardboard boxes the day after St. Nick arrived to turn a perfectly charming and orderly home into a maelstrom of discarded tissue paper.

The holiday's roots can be traced to Britain, where Boxing Day is also known as St. Stephen's Day. Reduced to the simplest essence, its origins are found in a long-ago practice of giving cash or durable goods to those of the lower classes. Gifts among equals were exchanged on or before Christmas Day, but beneficences to those less fortunate were bestowed the day after.

Centuries ago, ordinary members of the merchant class gave boxes of food and fruit to trades people and servants the day after Christmas in an ancient form of Yuletide tip. These gifts were an expression of gratitude to those who worked for them, in much the same way that one now tips the paperboy at Christmastime or slips the building's superintendent a bottle of fine whisky. Those long-ago gifts were done up in boxes, hence the day coming to be known as "Boxing Day."

Why do we celebrate the New Year with a baby? ... The idea of using an infant to symbolize the start of a new cycle began in ancient Greece, about 600 BC.  It was customary at the festival of Dionysus, god of wine and general revelry, to parade a babe cradled in a winnowing basket.  This represented the annual rebirth of that god as the spirit of fertility.  In Egypt, a similar rebirth ceremony was portrayed on the lid of a sarcophagus now in a British museum:  Two men, one old and bearded, the other in the fitness of youth, are shown carrying an infant in a winnowing basket.

So common was the symbol of the New Year's babe in Greek, Egyptian, and Roman times that the early Catholic Church, after much resistance, finally allowed its members to use it in celebrations - if celebrators acknowledged that the infant was not a pagan symbol but an effigy of the Christ Child.

Our modern image of a baby in a diaper with New Year's banner across its chest originated in Germany in the fourteenth century.  Celebrated in folk songs and illustrations of the day, the diapered tot was brought to America by German immigrants.

PS - A winnowing basket was used to separate the corn kernels from the outer husks or chaff. The thrashed corn was thrown up from the basket and the breeze (sometimes created by waving a sheet) blew the chaff from the heavier kernels.