My dad worked at one of our city’s factories for his entire working life. When we were small, my sister and I would accompany our parents each December to the company’s Christmas party held in a fancy (to us) hall someplace in town. The company Christmas party was one of the big events of the Holiday Season for us and it stoked our excitement as Christmas Day drew ever closer.
Santa Claus would show up to these parties, and all the children would be encouraged to gather around him as he handed each one a wrapped present tagged with their name. Oh, the wonder! And it wasn’t just the kids who would receive Christmas gifts from the company back then. There were years when dad would arrive home from work carrying a whole turkey or a chunk of Christmas cake, courtesy of his employers. My mother collected an entire set of casserole dishes over several years, that had been sent home for her as part of the company’s annual Christmas gifting. There are still some companies who hold family Christmas parties but increasingly, Christmas parties are an adult affair.
Take tonight, for instance.
Tonight is the Christmas party presented by the company that my husband works for. It is being held in a bar/restaurant, and spouses aren’t invited. It’s November.
Times have certainly changed.
I am totally fine with being excluded from tonight’s office event. Being a tag-along to a company party is no longer on my list of happily anticipated Christmas events and I doubt that I’m the only spouse/partner who had to contain a big sigh of relief at the news that we weren’t even being invited to this year’s soiree.
Office parties for companies that I am not an actual security-card-carrying employee of, just aren’t fun for me. I HAVE gone to a handful of his office’s parties when my husband has asked specifically for me to attend, but he knows that I prefer that he go and enjoy his work friends without me awkwardly standing around surreptitiously checking my watch. I am grateful.
Being a spouse/partner at an office Christmas party makes for a crazy long night of smiling wanly while listening to people rattle on to the same people they sit next to for 40+ hours a week, talking about work or people who used to work in their office, while their Plus Ones try desperately to find some topic—any topic—to talk to the other Plus Ones about.
I have the feeling that my husband is always surprised at how needy I am whenever I go along to one of his parties. He’ll encouragingly say things like, “You know Peter over there—you met him at that summer party 8 years ago. And there’s Jules’ wife—remember how well you got along with her when we met them at Costco that once? I forget her name.” And he expects that I’ll eagerly wander off to strike up a conversation with one of them. I don’t.
These evenings tend to always go the same way: we get there on-time and spend the next hour talking to the handful of others who didn’t get the memo that the term ‘on-time’ is actually a meaningless abstract, and sipping on what we begin to suspect are mocktails. Once people start to arrive there are waves of excitement as clump after clump of co-workers spill through the doors squealing with delight and surprise as they see people that they sit two rows of desks away from through the week but barely acknowledge. The women hug and air-kiss and the men all shake hands. That never happens at any other time throughout the year.
Depending on the type of event that has been planned, we either sit down at huge round tables and are slowly served dinner, or we join the line up snaking through the room towards the buffet. Either way, we’ll regret not having eaten something beforehand.
After dinner, The Boss will take to the mic to say a few words. Sometimes this works and sometimes it falls flat but, regardless, it has to be endured since he’s picking up the tab for the evening.
As a way to suggest that people are having way more fun than they actually are, the DJ takes this post-feeding/post-Boss’ speech opportunity to turn up the volume of the music until it is slightly below the level that makes your ears bleed, while we partygoers doggedly persist in trying to have conversations with strangers whose names we didn’t catch and who we will never recognize again.
And with loud music comes dancing. It’s never pretty.
As you see, I am in no way downcast about being stuck at home tonight while he flits off to the party. I’m content to be in my pajamas with an open bag of chips and a me-made cocktail, watching some rom-com with a wildly predictable ending on TV. However, I genuinely hope that my husband has a terrific time socializing with his co-workers at the Christmas party and I would imagine that there’s a part of him that is relieved about the many times this evening he won’t have to try to introduce me to someone whose name he can’t even begin to recall.
While I do realize that I have turned into a total sourpuss when it comes to being a Plus One for someone else’s work party, the truth is that I lost interest in the whole affair when Santa stopped showing up and once handing over an honest-to-goodness casserole dish became a far too antiquated way for a company to show their appreciation to the families who support their employees year ’round at home.
