From novelty jumpers to embarrassing themes, the annual work bash is where careers go to die. Are there any rules to protect you from humiliation?
It is quite fashionable to claim to hate work Christmas parties, which doesn’t mean you actually hate them, it just conveys disdain for the people for whom a work-organised drinking binge represents the pinnacle, the very walnut on top of their social whirl. But there are people who genuinely do hate work parties, because the grim half-memories that come rushing back, the dimly lit humiliations and shudders of self-abasement that barely add up to true recollections, are more like a dream or post-traumatic stress disorder. None of the following advice will help, since you still have to turn up, and it is still your own psyche you are wrestling with. But some Christmas party nightmares are not your fault.
Christians have worked hard to divert the festival away from its true meaning by loading it with animals, babies, wisdom and salvation. Originally, it was a carnival, in the anthropological not the fairground sense: a pressure valve for the constraints of daily life, a time-limited period of raging misrule, in which all hierarchies and duties were suspended. Those roots are the ones that run deepest in our collective psyches, the expression of which is drinking and taboo-breaking. Nobody wants to break a taboo on Christmas Day, when taboos and Baileys are the only things keeping it all together. It is only fun to break stuff in public. Being drunk and over-stepping the line are related, but not casually: everyone assumes afterwards that the inappropriate thing happened because a given person had dropped their inhibitions. But you have to ask how the chocolate penis arrived under the work tree addressed to the handsy guy in accounts in the first place.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://ift.tt/2j12fmR
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