Alan Rickman’s character states the typical approach to arranging one: ‘It’s basic, really,’ he says. ‘Find a venue, over-order on the drinks, bulk-buy the guacamole and advise the girls to avoid Kevin if they want their breasts unfondled.’ In truth, it might be better if everyone avoided everyone.
Croydon, Christmas 1990
I worked as part of a very dysfunctional team at a well-known shoe shop chain in south London. I remember that a goth ran the stock room, and he would write weird things on the shelves in permanent marker, like ‘I drink the vomit of the priestess’. The manager was this awful sleazy man, very large and sweaty, who had one of those wind-up clockwork penises on his desk.
We had our office Christmas party inside the shop. We brought in sausage rolls, alcopops and strong lager, and we started making turbo shandies. Things got a bit out of control, and the sales staff ended up locking the manager in one of those metal cages with wheels that you transport stock around in, and then forgot about him.
N. M.
The mismatch between the overwhelming demand for venues and a woeful supply shortage means that the office Christmas-party season now begins in October, before Hallowe’en, and ends in early February, by which time people are sick to the back teeth of Christmas and the whole event feels like a Fire And Ice-themed hallucination. But whenever it happens, it can quickly morph into a drunken splurge of emotion following a year of tension over rejected expense claims and overlooked promotions.
Manchester, Christmas 2009
At our Christmas party the CEO got blind drunk and passed out. The new and enthusiastic HR manager woke him up to ask him to make a speech. Everyone was saying, ‘Nooo, don’t’, but it was too late and the now-awake CEO grabbed the mic and started ranting about how terrible everyone was at their jobs, picking on people one by one. Understandably, some people objected, which further enraged the CEO, who then punched the director of operations before passing out again.
Another director said, ‘This is all your fault’, while pointing at the new HR manager, who burst into great drunken sobbing tears and everyone started shouting at his accuser for being cruel. Meanwhile, someone else tripped over outside while smoking a fag with his hands in his pockets. We sent him and his bloodied face to hospital in the same ambulance as two vomiting people who had alcohol poisoning.
J. D.
The many brands of painkiller, rehydration fluid and reflux suppressor that help people to deal with their hangovers tend to ramp-up their advertising campaigns in December, marketing themselves as the saviours of the gluttonous and the indulgent. Ridiculously, we tend to put these things very low down on our shopping lists.11 If, the morning after, you find a distressing absence of medication in the cupboard, there’s another option: hair of the dog. But while there’s plenty of dog hair to go around at Christmas, the evidence for it doing us any good is scant. We’re unlikely to benefit from seeking solace in whatever hurt us in the first place, and there’s an analogy I could draw here with a relationship I had in the early 1990s, but this isn’t really the time or place for that.
Despite its often unedifying after-effects, we have limitless affection for hot booze (and particularly mulled wine) in the run-up to Christmas. In A Christmas Carol, Dickens writes of ‘seething bowls of punch that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam’, and describes how cash-strapped Bob Cratchit manages to knock together ‘some hot mixture in a jug with gin and lemons’ in order to place a boozy gloss on the poverty his family were having to endure that winter. We live in a country where the temperature doesn’t drop below freezing that often, and most of us have central heating, but we still feel the need to heat up vats of dubious liquor, make it palatable with cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg and then ladle it into wooden goblets like a couple of Anglo Saxon revellers called Æthelbald and Eoforhild. The liquid might be billed as punch, mulled something-or-other, glögg (if you’ve got a thing about Vikings) or wassail (if you’re trying to lend your potent brew some historical legitimacy), but whatever it is, it gets you drunk more quickly than cold booze does. (I should add that I have no evidence for this theory other than my own weak anecdotal evidence. I did ask around, but it would seem that scientists have got better things to do than to test my unproven and probably incorrect theories about stuff that doesn’t matter, and who can blame them.)
Hot booze is a surefire Christmas money-spinner for the struggling British pub. The booze you use doesn’t really matter; in the same way that cheap white wine becomes more palatable the colder it gets, heating up red wine or cider can mask all manner of unpleasantness. Get a bag or two of mulling spices, wang it in a cauldron on the bar, stick a cardboard sign on the side featuring a carefree snowman and you’re quids in. The mark-up may be substantial and the liquid rather toxic, but as customers we can’t complain. That money goes some way towards compensating bar staff for their unenviable Christmas workload: dealing with revellers who a) can’t hold their drink, b) keep asking what you think of their jumper, c) order two rounds at once, including cocktails you’ve never heard of, and d) cause general havoc to a Christmas soundtrack until 1 a.m. Spare a thought for those who serve us the alcohol that will soon compromise our dignity. After all, we did ask them for it. They’re only obeying orders.
Peterborough, Christmas 1992
Me and my partner, who I lived with, went to the pub on Christmas Eve and he proceeded to drink much more than I did. Much more. I woke up relatively early the next morning, and sensed a steamy fug in the bedroom. It was a bit… cowshed-y. It was only when I got up that I realised he’d wet the bed. It was Christmas Day, the mattress was sodden, and worse, he was still absolutely hammered.
Initially he denied that he’d done it, which was ridiculous. Then he started to find it funny, but I was livid, and I told him that he’d ruined Christmas. He then went completely Basil Fawlty on me. ‘Right! I’ve ruined Christmas, have I? Well, in that case, why don’t I ruin Christmas completely?’ He marched down the stairs, over to the presents and unwrapped all of them, one by one, reading each label out to me as he did so. ‘So, Happy Christmas Uncle John, is it? Let’s see what’s in here, shall we?’ I just stood there, watching this drunken idiot ripping up paper. We’re not together any more, but I sometimes wonder if he remembers. It’s not something you’d forget, is it?
K. M.
We may all hope for the kind of soft-focus Christmas that we see in a Marks & Spencer advert, but alcohol can quickly turn from being an effective way of masking our emotions into suddenly becoming the bearer of great clarity. Situations that we’ve spent all year trying to avoid will suddenly be right there in the room, as honesty buttons are pushed and reality sets in. Drinkers find themselves doing things they really shouldn’t be doing, as booze traps them in their own worlds and causes them to unleash their own unique brand of embarrassing behaviour.
Weybridge, Christmas 1988
We always had big family Christmases. I’m one of seven, and we often had family friends over too. One Christmas when I was very young, I remember my primary school teacher turning up on the doorstep just as we were all sitting down for Christmas lunch. He had no trousers on. He was terribly apologetic about this, but he explained that he had no trousers with him either. My mum, who is very nice and would never have done anything other than invite him in, shooed him into the kitchen while she went upstairs to fetch some trousers for him. It was funny at the time, but of course now I understand that he was an alcoholic.
S. S.
Wandering trouserless in the streets isn’t remotely festive, and there are evidently people for whom the drunken revelry of Christmas is problematic. The sight of wobbly guys and gals making fools of themselves can be amusing, but festive boozing might be more of an issue for Brits than we realise. The December wind-down to Christmas can become rammed with social