Ever Wonder What Boxing Day is?

It’s Dec. 26. The Christmas wrapping is on the floor, and the kids are playing with the boxes their toys came in.

The refrigerator is filled with enough leftovers to last until Valentine’s Day.

Most of us have the day off, so there’s only one real choice you face today: Hit the after-Christmas sales, or hang around the house having fun and just being lazy.

We knew you wouldn’t want to read about anything serious today. So, as our present to you, we offer some day-after-Christmas trivia and answers to questions about the coming New Year.

Q: Santa left me an L.L . Bean sweater under the tree, but it’s the wrong size. Am I crazy to think about exchanging it today?

A: According to a spokeswoman from L.L. Bean, the store gets 13,000 to 15,000 visitors the day after Christmas and processes several thousand returns. You be the judge.

Q: My calendar says it’s Boxing Day. Who’s in the ring?

A: That’s no pugilistic term, although if you go shopping today you may feel as if you’ve been beaten by an angry crowd. Boxing Day is a holiday celebrated in Britain, Canada and numerous other English-speaking countries, so we went straight to the source: a Canadian guy.

Len Westerberg, a spokesman for the Department of Canadian Heritage, said the origin of the holiday may lie in the tradition of boxing up gifts of food, clothing and money for house servants the day after Christmas. Or the name may derive from the opening of church poor boxes that day.

Whatever. Today, it’s all about shopping or being lazy, which is exactly what Dec. 26 is about in the United States. Only in Canada, it’s a statutory holiday. That means that since Dec. 25 and Dec. 26 fall on Saturday and Sunday this year, Canadians will get Monday and Tuesday off and have a four-day weekend.

"If you find out your kid is three sizes larger than the sweater you got him, you run down to the store and hope that you can exchange it," Westerberg said. "But if everything fits and Grandma gave you a whole bunch of money, that’s a good time to run down because of the Boxing Day specials. That’s when the shopkeepers have to get rid of their winter stock because they want to start putting the bathing suits out next week."

Q: How long can I eat Christmas leftovers before they start making me sick?

A: Most leftovers should be used up within four or five days, according to Mary Ellen Camire, a professor of food science and human nutrition at the University of Maine.

A lot of people leave food out longer than they probably should during the holidays, she said. Bacteria are evolving, so that makes it all the more important to get your casseroles and other holiday goodies in the fridge as soon as you can after you’re done eating.

"Unfortunately, a lot of the serious bacteria that cause disease now can live in the refrigerator," Camire said. "It doesn’t stop their growth. Listeria is very bad because it grows in the refrigerator and it’s extremely toxic to pregnant women."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends discarding any turkey, stuffing and gravy that’s been left out at room temperature for more than two hours.

Refrigerate or freeze leftovers you want to save in shallow containers for quicker cooling.

Frozen leftovers will taste best if they are used within two to six months.

Q: Is it ever OK to put real egg in eggnog?

A: "Well, I wouldn’t," Camire said. "I just think it’s disgusting anyway."

If you must have eggnog on New Year’s Eve, use the pasteurized egg product found in the dairy case.

"Those would probably be all right," Camire said. "Pasteurization doesn’t make it sterile. It just knocks down the number of bacteria, but the pasteurized eggs are pretty safe."

Q: Lots of people will be toasting the New Year with a glass of champagne. Why does champagne always seem to go to your head faster?

A: The percentage of alcohol found in champagne is important, but probably the biggest factor is the carbonation, according to Karen Simone, managing director of the Northern New England Poison Center in Portland.

"Nobody knows for sure exactly what happens," she said, "but we think the carbonation causes the stomach to empty faster, and more alcohol will more quickly get into the small intestine, which is where most of it gets absorbed."

Scientists have, of course, studied this important question by comparing real bubbly with "degassed champagne." People who drank the carbonated champagne did indeed absorb the alcohol in it more quickly.

"The other thing that’s interesting about it is, if you look at what is the percentage of alcohol that would be the best percentage for good, quick absorption, you would be looking at 20 percent," Simone said. "Champagne’s in usually the 10 to 14 percent category, so it’s also favorable in terms of that."

To slow things down on New Year’s Eve, Simone suggests drinking slowly and eating something first.

Simone said the Poison Center gets a rash of calls regarding alcohol problems over the holidays. (The phone number is 1-800-222- 1222.) On New Year’s Eve, when adults are up late partying, she said, "they’ll go to sleep and leave the drinks and the cigarette butts out, and the little ones get up and they’ll go around tasting the drinks and eating the cigarettes."

Don’t do that.

If you do overindulge and wake up on New Year’s Day with a hangover, here are some remedies recommended by the National Headache Foundation:

Eat two tablespoons of honey on a cracker or a piece of toast, before or after drinking. Honey has fructose, a sugar that helps the body metabolize alcohol, and is rich in vitamin B6. Tomato juice also contains fructose and allows the body to burn alcohol faster.

Drink fluids containing minerals and salts, such as a cup of broth or a sports drink. They offer relief from dehydration.

Drink that old "I have a hangover" standby, coffee. Caffeine may relieve some headach symptoms and decrease the duration of the pain.

Take some Ibuprofen. It’s less irritating to the stomach than aspirin.

Q: What’s the deal with fruitcake? Is it fruit, or is it cake? And does it have any nutritional value, especially after it’s been circulating among family members for several years?

A: The fruit is there mostly for color, and although the cake might have a little bit of fiber, there’s probably no vitamins left, said Camire, the nutritionist from the University of Maine.

"It is an extremely rich source of energy," she said. "There’s a lot of fat and carbohydrate, but that’s pretty much it."

Camire believes canned popcorn is going to be the fruitcake of this millennium.

"All these stores have these decorative tins of popcorn, but you don’t know how old that popcorn is," she said.

Q: What’s the best way to get rid of your Christmas tree?

A: If you’re lucky enough to live in a community that recycles them, you’re all set. In Portland, for example, trees are taken to the Riverside recycling facility, where they are chipped and turned into mulch for the city’s gardens. What isn’t used gets burned as biomass fuel.

South Portland does the same thing, and residents are free to come take some mulch for their own yards.

But Christmas trees can also be recycled for use by wildlife. Put it out in the yard and "decorate" it a second time with orange slices, suet, and pine cones rolled in peanut butter and birdseed. String cranberries and raisins. The birds will come for the food and then use the tree as shelter.

"It will actually stay somewhat fresh outside because it will be cold," said Judy Walker, a naturalist at Maine Audubon.

If there’s tinsel on your tree, it’s probably a good idea to take it off first, Walker said.

"Some birds, in particular blackbirds, are attracted to sparkly, shiny things," she said. "I can’t imagine that they would ingest it, but they might very well take it and line their nest with it. Crows, in particular, and ravens sort of collect shiny things."

Q: What does Santa do the day after Christmas?

A: Who would know better than James Hutchins, director of The Santa Institute at the University of Mississippi Medical Center? The institute’s studies have shed light on such mysterious questions as "How does Santa know when you’ve been sleeping and when you’re awake?" (An image of Santa’s head, the institute’s researchers say, shows he has an extra lobe in his brain that may be the key to many of his supernatural abilities.)

Santa, elderly and overweight, isn’t in the best shape to begin with, so does he sleep in today because he’s so exhausted? Or do all those cookies and milk give him enough energy to bounce back quickly after a long night of delivering presents?

Hutchins said it would be best for Santa to sleep in, pointing to a recent study showing a link between obesity and lack of sleep. Santa suffers from chronic sleep deprivation around the holidays, so he should turn off his alarm.

"It might be a good thing, first of all, for him to pay off what scientists call his sleep debt and try to get caught up on his sleep, and then try to re-establish a more normal sleeping pattern," Hutchins said. "That may help with his weight, also, so we’re going to try making that recommendation to him this year."

As for the cookies and milk, the institute’s Dr. Rebecca Waterer studies Santa’s eating habits and has found that Santa metabolizes carbs in a different way.

"He’s using up a lot of energy," Hutchins said. "I would imagine that moving at the speed that he does, getting up and down chimneys and such, he probably needs some good carbs. But just the same, we’ve asked that maybe it would be a good idea if children would consider leaving a more healthy snack for Santa. Celery and carrots is alway nice, but a lot of kids don’t want to do that."

Q: Why does it seem like the years go by faster as you get older?

A: Cindy Lustig, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, studies how the passing of seconds to minutes seems to change as we get older, which has a lot to do with our ability to pay attention to things.

Lustig said there’s not a lot of scientific literature on this question, but she was willing to give it a shot.

"Time works kind of like a ratio," she said. "You can imagine if you are 5 years old, and you’re looking back on this year, this year has taken up 20 percent of your life. On the other hand, if you happen to be 75 and you’re looking back upon this year, it’s taken up about 1 percent of your life. So it’s because when we’re 75, as we get older we have more and more time built up that we’re comparing this one little year to."

Q: How likely is it, really, that you’ll keep your New Year’s resolutions?

A: For the past eight years, Robert Butterworth, a Los Angeles psychologist, has been warning people about the dismal success rate of New Years’ resolutions. As many as 80 percent of the people who who make resolutions have broken them by Jan. 20, he says.

"They do too many, they do it with everybody listening, and they take on too many hard things," Butterworth said. "The top three are weight, food, smoking, things like that. And those are the hardest. Nobody ever makes a resolution to drive nicer, or to be nicer to people, or to not yell at my employees. The ‘make the world a better place’ resolutions kind of fall by the wayside, but they’re kind of the easier ones to do."

People are drawn to the ritual of making resolutions because since ancient times, people have looked upon the end of the year as a time to wipe the slate clean and start anew.

"This is embedded in our psyche," Butterworth said.

But along with that comes the tendency to make wrong assumptions – that the urge to go to the fridge that was there Dec. 31, for example, will suddenly and magically disappear on Jan. 1.

Want to improve your record? Butterworth recommends building failure into the mix, and give yourself credit for little successes. Don’t try going to the gym every day if you haven’t been in two years.

"What happens is they start, they go three weeks and then they have a bad day," he said. "And instead of looking at those three weeks where they were good, they look at that one day and they just forget it. No one teaches them how to make a proper reoslution. You’re not going to go from a size 8 to a size 4. You’re not going to go from eating terribly to eating perfectly."

Don’t take on a resolution that isn’t really yours, but something your spouse or friends are pushing you to do. To succeed, you have to feel invested in the outcome.

And think about waiting a while after the holidays before you start.

"Everybody after the holidays is exhausted," Butterworth said. "You don’t run a marathon after you’ve walked 40 miles, and people want to take all these things on after the holidays when people have been over, kids are back out of school. We’re tired. You need a few weeks’ break."

He also suggests that if you feel like bragging about your resolutions, hold your tongue.

"The first day they go out and they sneak those chocolates or they have that cigarette on the corner, everybody points and says ‘A- ha!’ " Butterworth said. "Then you feel so bad you just kind of go away with your head down and slither off and say that’s it for this year."

Staff Writer Meredith Goad can be contacted at 791 – 6332 or at:

mgoad@pressherald.com