Someone asked me this the other day, where the phrase “piping hot” came from.

Aside from plumbing and sewing applications, the word piping has been used to describe sounds as might come from a flute or a recorder.

This reminds me of the joke “what’s the difference between an onion and a set of bagpipes?  No one cries when you cut up a bagpipe.”

On the flipside, I once heard a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation commentator say that the bagpipes were Scottish soul music.

Anyway, the phrase piping hot is a reference to the hissing and sizzling sounds that something coming out of the oven often makes.  The first record of the phrase is in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale which is part of the Canterbury Tales written more than 600 years ago.

The Canterbury tales have a reputation of being a little more sexy than one might expect.  In this section a guy named Absolom is in love with a woman named Alison and does everything in his power to win her, including sending her piping hot wafers and singing outside her bedroom window.  The fact that she is married and her husband notices doesn’t seem to matter much, and besides, his culinary and musical skills don’t ever win her over.  Instead, she compares him to a third guy Nicholas who seems even more attractive in comparison.  The result is

And Alison full soft down she sped;
Without words more they got in bed,
And thus lith Alison and Nicholas,
In bisynesse of myrthe and of solas

Which itself sounds piping hot.

Today is boxing day.  Why is it boxing day?

I have to thank Michael Quinion for his explanation on his website World Wide Words.  The first record that we have that December 26th is called boxing day was 1833, that’s the year before the first Christmas card was sent.

The reason it was called boxing day was that at that time people went around looking for their Christmas tips by knocking on the doors of people for whom they had done some work indirectly—like a delivery boy who didn’t get paid by the householder, but instead by the grocer.

The money was collected in a sort of piggy bank.  It was ceramic and had to be broken open later to get at the loot, but instead of being shaped like a pig, it was shaped like a, you guessed it, box.

The preferred day for collecting was the holiday immediately after Christmas day, more religiously St. Stephen’s Day.

There are three English meanings of “box.”  The box in boxing day is one, something to put things in.  Many boxes are made of wood and the second meaning of box is a particular species of tree.  Actually we don’t know if this is the second meaning or the first.  It may well be that little square boxes were named because of the wood they were made from.

The third type of box is what happens in a boxing ring, it is a punch.  This box doesn’t much make itself heard except in the name of the sport of boxing and in the almost quaint expression “she boxed his ears.”  This violent box appeared later in English and is just over 600 years old.

Box the tree and box the receptacle are both older than 1000 years old.  Both of these meanings trace back into Latin and Greek.

No one knows why to throw a punch is called “to box” but one of the theories relates to the Greek words for box the tree and box the rectangular container which were quite close in spelling to the Greek word for “closed fist.”

Looking at my own fist now, it is a little box-shaped.

Still, the OED leans toward the fighting box having emerged spontaneously in English.

These days boxing day isn’t about begging for tips, but might be closer to the fighting boxing as shoppers hunt for bargains in overcrowded stores.

Obviously the word Christmas is built on the name of Christ and a festival or celebration or mass in his honor.

My mother lamented people’s laziness at abbreviating the word to Xmas but in fact the use of x to signify Christ has a long history.

Etymonline points back to the 1500s for an example of Xmas and the OED has and Old English example in the 1100s.

Evidently it comes from Greek.  Sorry mom.

The name “Christ” wasn’t exactly what Mary and Joseph filled in on the birth certificate either.  This too is a Greek word which meant “the anointed” which was a translation from the Hebrew “messiah.”  According to Etymonline this title for Jesus moved into Latin and eventually English and pushed out an earlier Old English word meaning “healer” that had been used as Jesus’ title.

The mass that takes place in a church, from which Christmas takes its latter half, is derived from a word meaning “dismissal” or “sending away.”

This may seem a bit odd and even the experts haven’t quite figured it out.  While they are pretty sure of the “mass” – “dismissal” connection, there appear to be two possible dismissals taking place in the church service to which it might refer.

The first is the dismissal of catechumens before the Eucharist, and the second is the dismissal of the congregation at the end of the service.

It seems to me that naming a whole service after the dismissal that comes at the end says something about the service itself, but who am I to say.

This seems to be the most up to date research on the subject since it appears in the OED online as posted in draft September 2004.

Finally, I’d like to tell you about a bit of trivia I bumped into on this.  The first batch of Christmas cards sent are attributed to Sir Henry Cole in 1843 and if you think Christmas has become too commercial now, it only took 3 years before someone back then started producing Christmas cards commercially.  There was also a big stink about these early cards because they depicted a family with raised glasses of wine and that knocked the temperance people out of the Christmas spirit.

There was a lame old joke that went around when I was a kid.

The teacher would call out a student’s name.  The kid would say something like “yes” or “here,” the teacher would say “present” as she ticked off that name on her list, and the kid would say “yes please.”

We never suspected that being present in the class had any connection to the present we got under the tree, apart from Santa’s list of naughty and nice.  That’s where they joke lay, the words were unrelated.

Except that they aren’t.

Because the are related I will indulge in a few quotes focused on present as a point in time before talking about the kind we tie bows on.

At this time of year it is almost depressing to dredge up Ambrose Bierce and his Devil’s Dictionary, but here goes anyway: He defines the present as

“that part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope.”

Actually that does have some application to the boxes under the tree.

In his book 1984 George Orwell said

“who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

So to those parents out there, you control the presents, so see if you can use them to control at least the immediate future.

Okay, now to the meat of the present.  Now I’m talking about Christmas presents.  The very first present mentioned in the English language wasn’t exactly a Christmas present, but it was a present for Christ.  Once again that old etiquette guide for nuns, the Ancren Riwle is the source, this time complaining that when Christ was on the cross and moaned of his thirst, no one gave him a present of a beer or wine, or even water.  This is in fact the first appearance of the word “present” in any sense and it and all the other senses come out of a Latin root that essentially means “being there.”

So a gift is called a present because you present it, “here it is.”  The “being there” meaning obviously applies to the lame joke in the classroom but also to the moment in time between past and future.  That moment in time is called the present because we live “being here” in the present.

Now why would Charles Dickens have named his story A Christmas Carol?  It isn’t about singing is it?

Apart from the title, the word “carol” is only mentioned twice in the whole story.  Once when a kid is trying to sing through Scrooge’s keyhole, and again when Scrooge is with the first spirit and regrets that he didn’t give the kid some money.

A Christmas Carol was published in 1843.  By then the word “carol” had been in use in English for about 550 years.  By then two of its three earlier meanings had dropped out of sight.

A carol was at first the “line dance” of its day.  The idea was joy, pure and simple, and to enjoy yourself in a carol was to dance and sing in a circle.

My sources don’t seem to be able to tell me if the dancing or the singing or the circle came first, but it hardly matters.  From this it seemed that the word “carol” could be applied to any of the three even if the didn’t involve the other two.  So dance parties were sometimes called carols, circles were called carols, particularly those standing stone circles like Stonehenge.  And of course singing was called caroling.

Before it was specifically Christmas singing it was joyous singing generally, and that seemed to include the songs of birds.  So when Charles Dickens used carol in his title he was using a metaphor for a joyous song in which Scrooge turns from his covetous ways to become

“as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”