Are your work Christmas parties always bonkers or just ‘nice’ or low-key?

[whatthebell]

Every year on social media I hear lurid tales of utter carnage style staff Xmas dos, involving way too much drink, drugs, drunken falls, broken bones, cheating, fights and so on. How do these people ever show their faces back at work? None of my work Xmas parties have ever been wild! Of course lots of staff get tipsy or drunk, but not to a crazy level. Certainly nobody has ever been caught with drugs or someone they shouldn’t be with. Have I only ever worked in boring places with dull/sensible people, or have others on here just had nice normal Xmas meals/nights out with colleagues?

Nice. Low key. Lunch and then done.

when I was younger I went to some
wild ones - happy days, happy memories.

wouldn’t be allowed now

Ours tend to start off nice, meal with all of us, around 60, and then people either scarper at about 3 or decamp to the pub. It’s mostly pretty tame but there have been a couple of years where someone has got incredibly drunk; not being a nuisance - just basically falls asleep in the corner and everyone puts their cracker party hat on him 😂 and bundles him into a taxi home. Not every year but it’s happened twice as far as I can remember.

Maybe the difference is, I’ve only worked in places where you pay for the food and drinks yourself. Perhaps it’s different when the company is footing the bill and people can go crazy for free!

Ours are nice and low-key - drinks and some nice food early evening, then there’s usually a hard core who go on to the pub. Some tipsiness occasionally but nothing worse. It helps that we’re all old!

Very low key now. A lot of my team are quite young but none of them are big drinkers. The ones I went to in my 20’s were wild! I look back and cringe at our behaviour 🤣 At the time we all thought it was hilarious. I think nights out were generally much more chaotic in the 90’s (no mobile phones to capture the evidence!)

I've never had a wild Xmas party. Once someone got really drunk and was saying offensive things to the manager. She didn't remember the next day. The manager was really upset about it. The person was very apologetic. Another time someone got drunk and insulted everyone.

Yes back in the day I went to some big ones where the big sales company paid for everything and there was definitely some bad behaviour. Most people were single and young but not everyone.
Now I work for a small charity and there isn't even always any Christmas celebration for staff- which is a bit sad tbh.

Varied depending on where I working. when I was a young nurse in the late 1980’s it was wild. I also went to a very big one in a hotel where multiple companies and organisations had booked one or two tables each and one of my colleagues spent the night with someone from another table. It was like a huge wedding reception with about 400 people there.

The best was a buffet and karaoke on campus followed by a pub crawl round Birmingham city centre that lasted for just over 12 hours. Not wild as such just very good company.

My friend was telling me about theirs yesterday as it was over the weekend. One member of staff go so drunk they started hurling abuse at the boss and flipped some tables over.

Over the years I've seen a fair bit of carnage. People hitting each other, people hitting on each other, drinking too much and saying what they really think. Honestly I can't stand the annual party, as I work in HR usually I'm brought in to deal with any inappropriate aftermath!

I'm self employed so mine are so very low key they barely happen. My husband either doesn't attend his or leaves very early. They are carnage drink drugs and colleagues having sex in the toilet kind of carnage. I think a few might of even lost their jobs or had a stern talking to. I have no idea why they are like this. The company doesn't do a free bar so it's all on them drinking wise.

@ThirdStorm bet you always hope for a very dull do then!

Old job yes they were always mental but it was a free bar and paid for event.

Job now nope pretty tame some laughter drinks and low key some stay out but everyone usually home by 9pm!

Ive only been at very sedate Christmas dos for my whole career. However I did work somewhere where previous parties were so wild that Christmas parties were banned!

I worked in universities and the normally quiet and sensible lab staff I worked with seemed to have a personality change for the Christmas party. Lots of drunken antics, pretty boring really, a few shamed faces in the new year.
The worst was when we teamed up with library staff for a party. One senior librarian was being fondled by a junior member of staff in full view of everyone and another had sex with a library assistant in a storeroom. This was early 1980s and I don't think it was that unusual then.

Same. Civil service central government parties in the 80s were the greatest. Then again, I was 40 years younger x

The last one I went to a huge argument broke out over someone cheating on someone, someone smashed a beer bottle over someone else's head because they pushed a woman into the fountain, and a guy who was directly involved in all of the above punched the manager when she tried to get him away from the person he was trying to fight.

All still work there. Madness. I don't do Christmas parties anymore 🤣

Mine are dull and I can't really be bothered to go - I usually don't, which of course doesn't do me any favours career wise (it's not that I don't like my colleagues, I actually do, but my job is hands on, in person, no way to do it remotely and all people focus, and nine hours a day, and I don't want to stay after work to make small talk, I want to go home while I still have a scrap of social energy for my kids!)

I went to a couple of wild ones in the 1990s - different times, different industry, different (orders of magnitude larger) budget, different part of the world, different life phase, different age group across the entire company and different type of colleagues - everything was different!

I agree! Civil Service Christmas parties in the 80s were wild. Lots of drunken snogging and shagging on desks. Our social club was about five floors underground, with the loos on -1, so there was quite a lot of splashy vomit on the stairs when people didn’t make it to the loo. Night bus home, getting off at Sloane Square to be sick in the fountain. Too hung over the next day to be in before midday, if at all.

Yes!!! The greatest! Are you able to say which Dept you worked at? I was at the Dept of Health (the irony)

Our work Christmas parties are always extremely low key, during the day and sober.

Sounds great!

Fairly low key these days. I actually went out for Christmas lunch with the team before I joined properly and thought it was so refreshing that everyone listened to one another and took it in turns to talk, instead of shouting and talking over people.

The maddest ones were very drunken law firm dos in the late 1990s and 2000s. Fights, affairs, stripping off on the dance floor, always messy and loads of gossip after. The more senior members of staff behaved the worst.

I don’t go to mine but they are quite rowdy.