The Office Holiday Party

The company I work for throws a pretty lavish Holiday Party. It was last night. Free drinks for the first 2 hours, appetizers, a buffet, music (too loud) & dancing in an interesting space, plus a taxi-chit for the ride home —all-in-all I'd call that pretty generous. Just about everyone drinks too much during the open bar period, so you really have to go nuts for that to be much of an issue. And people look forward to it, it's morale builder and widely appreciated I'd say. People who get transferred to another division will do almost anything to get themselves an invite.

But it's still an office party, which makes it fraught.

Skillfully negotiating any social interaction is a challenge. Doing so with your colleagues is an order of magnitude harder: there's the extra layer of explicit power relationships imposed over top of all the normal complexities of human interaction; then there's the weirdness of managing the gap between one's workplace persona, and the one we display in more normal social situations.

I went into this year's party with two main objectives. The first: don't get drunk. In this I succeeded, but, yeah, sort-of depending on your definition of drunk. I had at least 2 drinks more than I really intended or wanted but far from enough to make me stupid, or sick. Good for driving? No. So one or two weak-assed cheers me! But drinking more than intended gave me the opportunity I did get to think about how I react to social pressure.

It's a weirdness of mine (or is it?) that I seem to want to maintain a distance from people while not wanting to seem aloof or remote. I thus accept that extra drink so easily. Fear of judgement makes it hard for me to open up and just be who I am. And not just at work, I do it in most other groups I'm part of. So I don't want to be the guy who's not drinking (what a prude!) or the guy who's way out-of-control (how embarrassing!). No I'm middle-way guy. That's why Buddhism comes so easily.

Two years ago at this same Christmas party I sat down to talk with a co-worker who had gone a bit too far at that open bar (open a full 3 hours that year). I thought I was just being friendly and doing the circulate thing (better word than network). I realized quickly that my co-worker's excesses were due to an issue at home. A big issue. Never got the full details and I was reluctant to pry but also willing to support this colleague as best I could. The thing that really floored me though was being asked for general relationship advice because (slurred): you've got it all figured out, you've got it all together.

I was very deeply depressed at the time.

My career was in the dumps, as I thought everyone at work must know. My family life wasn't entirely ruined but it was heading in that direction, and I had neither idea nor energy for combating or reversing those realities. I felt I had no one to turn to and no one to who could understand, and here was a colleague looking at me as though I had the answers! It was an eye-opener.

I wish (and hope) I was able to provide some solace to my colleague, who is still working here —we both act now as though it never happened, which may be true on one side, given the level of intoxication— but I wish I had opened up more about my own struggles. Not for sympathy but because it might've been helpful to that troubled colleague to know about the vast gulf between perception and reality.

It maybe isn't surprising that my own turn around from depression started around that time. Learning about that perceptual chasm was strangely helpful to me, and so now with hindsight I wish I'd thought and been courageous enough to reciprocate. But it was a co-worker, and so the whole framework of work-relationships and how-will-this-look-tomorrow, and how-much-do-I-trust-this-person came into play also, and I shrank from being fully a friend (I hope too that part of my reticence was a genuine wish not to turn the conversation into one about me; and I also can forgive myself because it wasn't until much later that I had any idea how powerful that knowledge could be).

So my other main objective at this year's party was to be more authentic. To be present and fully available to those around me. Did I succeed? Nothing came up that really tested me. Nothing of course, except those 2 extra drinks.

Maybe next year.

Operation: Christmas!

Sunday marks Advent 1. It's the Christian church's New Year's Day, and the day I consent to turn on our Christmas lights and start listening to Christmas music. Scroogish as that may be, 5 weeks of Jingle Bells is quite enough, thank you very much, and I really don't want to feel like screaming by the time December 25th actually rolls around and the Little Drummer Boy comes into my hearing for the 400th time. So I've put limits on the duration of the holiday season. Christmas needs to be smaller.

Last year a number of my Facebook acquaintances (and at least one family member) made a big show of the fact they were going to use the phrase "Merry Christmas" as opposed to, I suppose, "Happy Holidays" or perhaps "Go to Hell" (they weren't always clear). I think they were signing on in spirited defense of Christmas. And good for them! From a Christian perspective I think Christmas needs some defending. Maybe they're a bit late —because it seems the war has already been mostly won by the bad guys— but better late than never, and Christians should relish a lost cause!

The problem is this victory over Christmas hasn't been won by a few well-meaning school boards or other public institutions making the holiday smaller, it's been won by large corporations —that big eastern syndicate as Lucy says so memorably in A Charlie Brown Christmas— making it bigger. Whatever Christmas is today, it sure isn't a religious holiday, unless perhaps you're a member of the Church of Mindless Over-Consumption and Enforced Jollity. Christmas has become something so pervasive, so all-encompassing & enormous that it can't be restrained or limited by some puny public agency deciding to call things by names like Winter Festival Concert, or Holiday Tree. The "season" swallows about 15% of the year! Who knows how much of our disposable income is burned along with the yule log? Obviously it's enough to turn loss-making retailers profitable!

These earnest Christian acquaintances of mine aren't fighting the right fight. Or more accurately they're on the wrong side. In trying to get everyone to join them in saying "Merry Christmas" to all-and-sundry, far from defending the holiday, they're actually participating in this enlarging of the season. Dragooning non-Christians into saying "Merry Christmas" (or harassing them by saying it) isn't going to make the country more Christian. It's going to make non-Christian people resentful and additionally siphon away whatever religious meaning remains in the holiday (surely must be sucking air by now). Those who aren't already committed Christians will drain the word "Christmas" of its original connotations, increasing the space for that eastern syndicate to define the season in its profit-making interest.

Peace on earth, goodwill towards all? Yes, please! But why not save the rest of it for church, where it'll be understood and appreciated more!