When Hallam FC entertain Pontefract Collieries in the North Eastern Counties Football League Division One at Sandygate Road on Boxing Day, the club based in the Sheffield suburb of Crosspool will continue a tradition they helped start exactly 156 years ago. An offshoot of the local cricket club, Hallam FC are the world’s second oldest football team and were formed to provide opposition for nearby Sheffield FC. The sides clashed in football’s first Boxing Day fixture in 1860, with the hosts forced to call on extra bodies from the nearby hamlet of Stumperlowe to make up the numbers for a match that was won by the visitors, whose three years of extra experience clearly proved telling.

As they reflected on the action over a few snifters in The Plough, an adjacent watering hole that remained open until earlier this year, the supporters of both teams could have had little or no idea they had unwittingly drawn up a blueprint that would dictate the behaviour of millions of like-minded individuals of future generations courtesy of the peculiarly British tradition of scheduling football matches on each year’s Feast of Stephen.

First match. Last match. Local derby. Boxing Day. They are invariably the first four of the games every fan’s eyes flick towards upon the release of the fixture list each summer and if you’re away from home on 26 December, the fervent hope is that you won’t have to travel too far. This year in the top flight, the already beleaguered West Ham hardcore can be considered to have drawn the short straw: a 740-kilometre round trip to see their team take on Swansea City.

Rugby. Horse-racing. Darts. Cricket from Melbourne’s MCG. It behoves us to point out that football does not enjoy a Boxing Day monopoly and, for the general armchair sports fan, few days in front of the television are better than this one. However, it is with the annual nationwide stampede for a bracing afternoon of festive football entertainment that this day on the calendar remains most readily associated.

With their own leagues having paused, supporters in countries such as Spain, Germany and Italy invariably gaze our way with a mixture of incredulity and envy as hundreds of thousands of their endearingly odd British counterparts brave the cold and head off to enjoy a rare and edge-free air of stadium-based conviviality and bonhomie that – let’s not forget this is football – invariably evaporates within a few minutes of the referee’s first whistle.

Following the precedent set by Hallam FC and Sheffield FC 28 years previously, the newly formed Football League staged its first Boxing Day fixture in 1888 when Preston North End beat Derby County. The match was played at a time when Christmas Day was a rare public holiday and those who carp about the demands of the festive schedule may be interested to learn that while Preston were putting five past Derby, the players of Everton were lacing up their boots for their third match in two days. On Christmas morning in 1888, William Edward Barclay’s men beat Blackburn Park Road in a Lancashire Senior Cup match, before playing an exhibition match against Ulster FC that afternoon. The Boxing Day game against Bootle ended scoreless to make it a relatively happy but exhausting Christmas in which Everton pulled of the commendable feat of going unbeaten in three matches over 24 hours – heroics one suspects the current side might struggle to emulate.

On this day last year the Premier League served up 23 goals, a thoroughly unremarkable tally from the 10 matches played. On Boxing Day in 1963, however, scoreboard operators across the country were kept busy as the same number of top flight matches yielded an astonishing 66 goals. That remains a record. Eleven of them were scored at Craven Cottage, where Fulham hammered Ipswich Town 10-1, and anyone tuning in to hear the classified results on that particular evening could have been forgiven for thinking the wireless announcer had been at the sherry: Liverpool 6-1 Stoke City, West Ham 2-8 Blackburn, Blackpool 1-5 Chelsea, Burnley 6-1 Manchester United, Nottingham Forest 3-3 Sheffield United, West Brom 4-4 Tottenham, Wolves 3-3 Aston Villa, Sheffield Wednesday 3-0 Bolton and the comparatively tedious Leicester 2-0 Everton.

For all its apparent randomness, myriad are the factors that need to be considered before the fixture computer does its thing each summer, and the avoidance of big matches with a potential for crowd trouble on Boxing Day is one. It was not ever thus and derbies were once a regular feature of the Christmas calender in order to reduce the need for fans to travel.

Having begun this column in Sheffield, it is there we will return to revisit the scene of another famous Boxing Day derby. On 26 December 1979 more than 500 police were in attendance to supervise the 49,309 locals who had turned up at Hillsborough to see Sheffield Wednesday take on Sheffield United in a Division Three match.

Having scored Wednesday’s second in a 4-0 rout, Terry Curran was unable to resist the temptation to slide triumphantly across the turf in front of the Leppings Lane end where several thousand Blades fans were assembled and was promptly pelted with coins for his part in what would become known locally as the Boxing Day Massacre. It seems that even in the season of goodwill to all men, many have their limits.