I’ve been doing this so long I can no longer remember if I’ve told a particular story before, but a quick search suggests maybe not*, so what the hell. Old women are allowed to repeat themselves.
I saw a Saturday Night Live sketch on office Christmas parties, which reminded me of the terrible ones we had in Fort Wayne, with one exception. You’d think a newsroom could throw a fun party, but we were cursed in some way. The job of organizing was usually given to the executive editor’s secretary, and her budget was limited. One year we had the worst chicken of my life — it seemed to have been boiled. The entertainment was a local elementary school choir, who didn’t sing Christmas songs but music that had been written for a non-denominational holiday play nobody knew, so the songs made no sense and weren’t very good, either.
She also invited a high-school girl who’d won a state speech championship to perform for us. She chose a dramatic dialogue where she played both parts, one an older, old-fashioned black woman and the other her younger, angrier daughter. The daughter was trying to convince the mother that white people never had her best interests at heart, but the mother was sweet and religious and believed it would all work out, praise Jesus. The climax, for me, came when the daughter exploded, “Mama, they call us n—–s behind our backs!” Ohhh-kay! That’s getting us in the holiday spirit!
The next year we, as in my colleague Adrianne and I, went to management in October and suggested we’d be willing to take over the job. We spent the paltry budget on deli platters and found a local bar with a private basement room. It was a little small for our purposes, but that only led to the convivial feeling. Open bar until the money ran out, then cash bar, mix tapes of bumpin’ holiday music, and we all had a great time. The night ended with a men’s room singalong of “The 12 Days of Christmas,” only with improvised lyrics. I remember “six urinals flushing!,” and a designer standing near one would do so. Some years later, we did something similar, with a karaoke machine. I recall an overnight sports guy, whom some privately called Boo Radley, wowing us with his interpretation of “Friends in Low Places.”
But the last one I endured there was pretty grim. It was held in the newsroom, over the lunch hour. Management kept finding new depths of cheapness, and I think they contributed a wan, unappetizing ham, not even Honeybaked. The rest was potluck, and the entertainment was a staffer with a keyboard and his own repertoire of Christian music.
All my employment after that was at small outfits, so the holidays could be observed in restaurants, at a couple pushed-together tables. They were fine. Lunch, a drink or two, and then home. At Deadline Detroit, we made it a dinner, at a Mexican restaurant with very good food that also allows guests to carry in their own booze, i.e. a perfect venue. The boss picked up the check. He probably spent more on six or seven of us than cheap-ass Knight Ridder, a major corporation, did on that stupid ham.
The parties in Columbus were much more in the traditional spirit of a holiday bacchanal — heavy-pouring bartenders and a quiet little library clerk throwing up in the hallway.
All this by way of saying we saw this movie, “Office Christmas Party,” on Christmas Day 2016, and it was very funny. Great cast.
* on a subsequent search, I see I did tell some of these stories, in 2005. Some details are different, but the gist is the same. Oh, well. It’s what old ladies do.
Tell us a Christmas/holiday office party story if you’ve got a good ‘un, eh?
Joe Kobiela said on December 18, 2024 at 9:45 am
Guess things have changed, in 2005 you didn’t blank out the N word but spelled it out in full.
Brother Dave and I worked for a company when we were on layoff from Dana that sold water mains, sewer pipe and such, it was located behind the Picker on Wells street the Christmas party’s were legendary starting at 7am and lasting thru out the day. Maybe he can remember some stories from them.
Pilot Joe
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Deborah said on December 18, 2024 at 9:58 am
At the 3 architecture firms I worked for they usually had holiday parties at some fancy venue and I always hated them. Spouses and dates were invited so that instantly meant you didn’t know half of the hundreds of people there. The women went out and bought special outfits for them. The bad music was too loud so you couldn’t talk, all you could do was drink and dance badly.
But one of the design firms I worked for had decided a couple of lean years to just have the parties in the office, no spouses etc. those were actually fun, exceptionally fun.
My favorite movie with an office Christmas party is Desk Set with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. I measure office Christmas parties by that one, most don’t match up.
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Julie Robinson said on December 18, 2024 at 11:17 am
We saw that same SNL skit and it contained much truth. As for the FWN advertising parties, there may still be readers here from that era, so lips are zipped.
But another place, in the early 1980’s: I was quite sure someone would get a DUI on the way home, or even worse, cause an accident. Most of the employees were older men and most of the conversations made me deeply uncomfortable. The boss would drone on and on, his wife would give the wives a “lovely glass figurine from LS Ayres”, and we would escape as soon as we could.
Dear PJ, yes, things have changed since 2005. Now most of know better than to use hateful and racially insensitive words. And please don’t say it was a joke. It wasn’t; it was hateful and racially insensitive.
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alex said on December 18, 2024 at 11:20 am
The office Christmas parties at my last place of employment went from extravagant to cheap during the 18 years I was there, although certainly not as spartan as the ones Nancy described. They still had amazing food and an open bar, but got very stingy on gift-giving and bonuses, and the event became rather poorly attended by the time I retired, but that was totally in keeping with the flagging morale of the place.
When I began working there, the old-timers told me that spouses were no longer invited because of too many drunken fights breaking out between wives and office paramours. They also held the event off the premises in public venues where people were forced to behave because the parties had become too debauched and the office would get way too trashed. I’m sorry I missed out on those days or I’d have better stories to tell.
One day I pushed up on a tile in the dropped ceiling in my office and a very old Budweiser can rolled out and fell to the floor, a relic from a past Christmas party I was told by a previous occupant.
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Jeff Gill said on December 18, 2024 at 11:34 am
There’s an interesting study to write a thumbsucker about, how across a range of settings, business or non-profit, academic or industrial, the office/department/program Christmas party has gone from legendary 1960s bacchanals to a Zoom meeting nod to the season, with beverages of course provided by the ones on their side of the screen.
Monday night I got back home to attend my spouse’s last senior staff holiday party (she retires Feb. 28th), and all of us partner/+1s were talking during the appetizer hour how this particular December ritual was the last one any of us were aware of where the boss offered up open bar, full dinner, and there were gifts for all the employees.
Back in 2002 I was a contributor/work-for-hire columnist, but got invited to the “publisher’s party” in the newsroom of the mother ship; it had just gotten purchased by Gannett a few years before. There *was* a Honeybaked ham, and a modest open bar (no coffee, though), but lots of muttered conversation by older staff about how these parties “used to be.” (The Wigwam’s glories were an often mentioned comparison as to our Dispatch betters, not yet swept into the Gannett fold.) It vanished utterly the next year, and the weekly I was writing for at the time met at our editor’s home with a potluck BYOB celebration; then we had editors who lived in different counties and of course no gathering.
My son said a new hire at his place of employment asked in his earshot if there was a Christmas party, and was met with laughter by the general manager.
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Heather said on December 18, 2024 at 11:44 am
At my corporate job the holiday parties ran the gamut over the years, from nice events in a restaurant to karaoke and things like that in the office. One year we had it at the McDonald’s HQ in Oakbrook. Another year it was on the Odyssey, a cruise ship on Lake Michigan. In January. Yes, you definitely want to be stuck with your coworkers on a boat for 2+ hours on a freezing gray day when it’s too cold to even go out on deck.
Other department heads would also take their teams out for a nice lunch, but our team had a cheapskate boss who did that maybe once. My coworker and I figured out later from comments that he dropped that his wife was a bit jealous and would have been annoyed he took his mostly female team out.
No more office holiday parties for me as I’m self-employed, but I can’t say I miss them all that much.
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Jeff Borden said on December 18, 2024 at 11:46 am
The holiday parties at Crain’s Chicago were always held at a quality restaurant…often lunch at a great Italian joint across the street from Steppenwolf Theater. Lots of food. Lots of wine. Great gifts, too. Polartec pullovers with the CCB logo, expensive gym bags, etc. Oh, and everyone got an extra paycheck as a bonus. Full salary. It was a family-owned business and the owners were fairly generous.
Those days are long gone. A new generation of owners put the kibosh on that kind of thing years ago.
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Joe Kobiela said on December 18, 2024 at 12:19 pm
Julie@3,
Don’t get your Panties in a wad, it was just a observation and meant nothing.
Pilot Joe
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Suzanne said on December 18, 2024 at 12:47 pm
One of my jobs was at Fort Wayne regional office of a non-profit whose main office was in Indy. The holiday party was always in Indy where they supplied the meat and we were all to bring a side, which was a bit tricky when you had to get up well before dawn and drive 2 hours to get there. One year, someone had the brainiac idea to have us all watch a movie before the lunch because how fun would that be! So we dragged our rear ends down to Indy with potluck offerings (I almost always brought cookies or something) and sat for another 90 minutes or more watching a movie. Regional offices were not pleased.
Other experiences were things like the benevolent overlords who gave us an extra 30 minutes for lunch before Christmas so we could go out to eat together (paid for by us), bringing in a holiday meal for employees that featured Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken, or bringing carry-in deli trays from Kroger. At one job, I wasn’t hired until the year after the Victorian themed Christmas party for which employees were to dress up in Victorian costumes.
I recall my dad’s work holiday party when I was in high school (1970s) when my sister and I came home and found his tie in the kitchen sink, his suit coat on the floor, and a barfing dad on the couch. Ah, those halcyon days when drinking and driving wasn’t really considered a problem.
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