Celebrating in style

I think I miss holiday parties more than I should. 

Not that I miss the dressing up. Conversing with family and friends in the warm glow of festive decorations. Eating and drinking just a tad too much. Any remaining stress from the party preparation melted away with the first hardy laugh. None of that has disappeared. It's still happening, though perhaps in smaller, more subtle ways.

More ornate observances have gone the way of obsolescence. 

Those fancy fetes seemed rare in the before-times anyway. The gatherings I remember best, and miss most, amounted to an awkward pause in the workday when a few of my coworkers would chat about the things they had left on their To-Do lists as they wait in a line at the break room for a slice of pizza and a handful of sugar cookies. The parties would always last for about seven minutes before we'd return to our desks and eat in silence.

Is it weird to miss such an office holiday party?

The kind of forced frivolity at which we all used to scoff, they seemed to be just tinseled up coffee breaks designed by the very folks who may have already been working on our last, frazzled nerve. Nothing says holiday spirit like dunking on Dave from accounting.

Especially since there was always someone reminding you (usually Dave) as they filled their plates, that, in some past iteration, these parties used to be something grand. They'd be the highlight of the entire year, held in some grand hotel with catering and a cash bar. We'd go for scandal and intrigue. It would produce a story so salacious that it would be woven into the office lore and spread by successive generations of employees as if they were there.

Suffice it to say we were not our best selves.

It's a shame people don't remember how nice it was that Danielle made buckeyes every year. I hope we thanked her.

Sometimes I think when all this is over -- when we can lower our masks and truly embrace -- we may end up keeping our distance.

Eventually, we may even give up on the graduation of "normals" from new normal, to newer, to newest as we come to accept that some of the workarounds may suit us better than the old normal ever did.

I was thinking about this as I planned our running club's unofficial holiday party for the second year in a row. Unlike pre-pandemic years, where a panel of club officers voted on venues and menus and budgets, this time it was just me, plotting a course around the neighborhood for a winter evening tour of the local holiday lights. I would throw caution to the wind by bringing along a carafe of cocoa and a sleeve of paper cups. 

I hope this kind of celebration – a simple pleasure - will stick once the pall of this pandemic lifts. Because wearing a set of jingle bells from my running belt so the sound carries through the course as other like-minded friends follow along with their elf hats and Santa beards and blinking safety lights, will be a memory I cherish forever.

So you can bet when we can finally celebrate in style, I'll be there with bells on.