How much longer, we ask with indignant
sorrow, is the humbug of Boxing-day to be kept up for the sake of draining the
pockets of struggling tradesmen, and strewing the streets of the metropolis with
fuzzy beadles, muzzy dustmen, and intoxicated - but constant - scavengers? We
have received the usual intimation from our pertinacious friend who eases us of
our dust, that he expects us to come down with our dust in another sense, at
what the fellow sarcastically calls "this festive season." The
gentleman who boasts of his "constancy" in scavenging - as if he loved
the mud and stuck to it - has apprised us, according to his annual custom, that
we are to ascertain his genuineness by a dog with a black eye, a white nose, a
red ear, an absent tail, a swelling on his left cheek, and other little symptoms
of his having lived the life of a busy dog rather than of a particularly lucky
one.
The Christmas Box system is, in fact, a piece of horribly
internecine strife between cooks and butchers' boys, lamp-lighters, beadles and
all classes of society, tugging at each other's pockets for the sake of what can
be got under the pretext of seasonable benevolence. Our cooks bully our butchers
for the annual Box, and our butchers take it out of us in the course of the year
by tacking false tails on to our saddles of mutton, adding false feet to our
legs of lamb, and chousing us with large lumps of chump in our chops, for the
purpose of adding to our bills by giving undue weight to our viands. Punch
has resolved on the overthrow of the Boxing system, and down it will go before
1849 has expired.
Punch, Jul.-Dec. 1848