Nick Coleman: Today, you might find the holiday spirit

Commentary

My new heroes are the subway workers of the London Underground who balked at being told they had to work today, the day after Christmas. In a pig's eye, they said.

The day after Christmas, known colloquially as "Boxing Day," is a public holiday in Britain, Australia, Canada and many other countries, including Ireland, where it is called St. Stephen's Day, and where traditional mummers or "Wren Boys" march around small villages, playing music and demanding treats.

Ordered to work under normal rules and for regular pay, the union representing British train drivers demanded a threefold pay increase for the holiday and a compensating day off.

When the transit authority wouldn't agree, the drivers called a 24-hour strike. Boxing Day, by hook or by crook, will remain a holiday for them.

That's all right with me. We need a break, and it's about time somebody had the backbone to say so. Boxing Day -- some think the name harks back to the days when boxes were put out to collect alms for the poor -- is just in the nick of time.

You would need a cattle prod to get me to go near a shopping mall, an office or a factory today.

With Christmas on Saturday, today seems an even more important day of rest, a day not only to set aside our labors but also to lay down our burdens -- the commercialism of a month of shopping, the contentions of our fretful political battles and the anxieties of an uneasy world.

My St. Stephen's Day gift to myself is nothing, and lots of it. Boxes of it. Nothing is a gift that keeps on giving, and I plan to give it to my children, too.

But nothing is not easy to give, or to receive. Wanting nothing is against our religion.

There is a trio of boys at our home who know by now that Santa did not bring them any Game Boys or Wiis or most of the must-have things that have dazzled them on TV since the Christmas ad deluge began. Their lack of wish-list success doesn't make me morally superior; just inattentive.

The first-grader started making his list last summer, keeping it on the mantel for easy updating and copying the names of Lego play sets from a toy catalog, including their serial numbers and trademarks, which he meticulously drew in crayon.

What says Merry Christmas like a Lego Assassin Droids Battle Pack?

He still believes in reindeers on roofs and miracles under the tree, but he has just enough of a public-school education to know he has to keep his beliefs on the down-low.

So when "Santa" and Mrs. Claus dropped in on a neighborhood Christmas party to hand out presents, he accepted his politely but kept his head.

"When that Santa Claus came in," he said later, "I muttered to myself. I muttered, 'That guy's a fake. No one sees Santa.'"

I feel the same way. There is precious little time to see Santa, or to get in touch with the Christmas we long for during a month of hectic insanity.

December seems engineered to keep us from seeing Santa.

Shopping, working, school, errands, piano lessons, hockey, church: Choose your own family's distractions; there is little time for savoring the season. Exhaustion sets in before the Excelsis Deo.

Then add a few traffic-snarling, street-fouling snowstorms, and it becomes all too obvious that we can't keep up with the deepening piles of demands.

No wonder that, according to Consumer Reports, 20 percent of us hadn't even begun shopping with just three days left to Christmas.

But I found part of what I was looking for when I put the boys to work on the mounds of snow along our driveway, already piled so high that additional snow tossed on top slid back down in avalanches that reburied the cement.

Sending them up the peaks with shovels to push the snow further away to lower drifts -- leveling the summits so I could toss more snow on top -- was the only thing that worked.

And in that chore, away from the TV and the computer and the traffic jams and the shopping malls, despite all the odds and the competing demands on our time and energy, I could feel a little Christmas.

Together, shoveling, falling in the snow, working and laughing, there was something small and sweet and worthwhile. Real.

It's what we've been looking for all month and have been too busy to find: Us, together.

That's what Boxing Day should be about and why I hope those British train drivers stick to their guns and stay off the job today. They are giving us all a gift.

The beautiful gift of nothing.

Nick Coleman writes the blog "The State We're In."