Preparing for New Year's Eve

We are getting ready for New Year’s Eve. I’ll shop for yummy snacks and we’ll stay up late—or not. Go to parties, or not. We might dress in sparkles or just relax in flannel as 2016 officially ends. And then…

And then it is a new year and the very first day of 2017. A new year is a blank slate, and while we love that it is also just a little unnerving.

Maybe part of the over-drinking and over-eating we’ll indulge in later this week happens not so much because of what we are leaving behind but rather because of what lies ahead. Maybe, like me, you have been saying, “I’ll deal with that after the holidays.” 

And now, suddenly, January 1st approaches bringing this uncomfortable combination of agitation and malaise.  Expectation does that. The arrival of this delayed reality is also the arrival of what are, in the best sense, our ordinary lives.

In the Christian liturgical calendar the days that are not Advent, Christmas, Lent or Easter are called Ordinary Time. While we delight in holidays we know that our ordinary time is much more precious. Our ordinary days, though they don’t make it into photo albums, are the days in which we live our real lives. 

The older we get the faster time seems to move. We might assume that this is because we are more aware of our mortality, but there is also research that suggests that the shift in how we experience time is neurological and results from lowering dopamine levels in the brain which occurs as we age. On New Year’s Day we grab at time: If time is limited, and the slate is clean, how will I choose what goes into my new year?

Our fantasies run to perfection, and the new calendars we start now collude with us. A calendar is an organizational tool, but it is also a hedge against despair. For one day we enjoy the promise of those 365 empty, numbered squares. And then, pen in hand, we strike: How to fill it? (This is why using a phone calendar is so unsatisfying: there is no demarcation, no old versus new, and no regret versus hope.

Even if we don’t formally write out New Year resolutions, most of us hope for improvement to body, mind or spirit in 2017. Whatever our goals, what we hope for is always something better: better relationships, better health, better work, and we rail against the imperfect. But in ordinary time, and in our real lives, all that we have-- and that we can have-- is imperfection. 

Still, we try to wrestle time into submission. We talk about how we will spend time in the New Year and that metaphor is a good one: Time is precious. It can be served, stolen, borrowed and squandered. It flies and flows and runs out. Without time we can’t even tell the simplest story. All narrative depends on it. Beginning, middle, end. Past, present, future. 

When we choose a verb we are saying something about time. There is a bit of wisdom from the ancient Latin grammar that we can borrow for this day. It is the verb tense called “past imperfect,” used for actions still uncompleted, and for stories continuing to unfold. 

That is the tense--and perhaps the tension--of New Year’s Eve.   

And so for your New year’s Eve, whether in sparkles or flannel pajamas, let us welcome 2017 by relaxing our vigilance and allow our stories to unfold in blessed, imperfect, and ordinary time.

The Ho Ho Holiday Party at Work

We are entering the time of year that makes seasoned managers cringe and human resource directors want to leave town.  Despite fine words to the contrary, there is little Peace on Earth at the office this time of year because we are getting ready for the office Christmas, oops, I mean “holiday” party. 

Yes, we’ve learned to choke on the word Christmas and insist that the December party where we dress in sparkles, bring wrapped gifts, and drink eggnog standing next to an evergreen tree is just a winter event. But language games are the least of it when management has to plan the annual

—“no one will be happy no matter what we do”--office holiday party.

Career coaches give us the guidelines: You must attend, you should not drink, don’t dress like a stripper, and do make an effort to talk to many people. The warnings should certainly be heeded. The annual holiday party is ground zero for what is known in Human Resources as the CLM, or the Career Limiting Move. CLM’s include Xeroxing body parts, getting tanked with co-workers, and making jokes about the boss to his/her spouse. But love them --or leave them early-- the office holiday party is a ritual of the workplace.

The list of issues is long: Do we go out on the town or stay in the building? Is the event during work or after hours? Will there be dancing? Music? And biggest bugaboo: booze or no booze? The tension produced along the way inevitably ends up in an annual review or with someone not forgiving someone else for months.

Divisiveness is in the details. One of the words tossed around liberally in the weeks leading up to the party is “they” as in  they don’t have kids, they don’t like to drink, they drink too much, or they don’t have to pay a baby-sitter. Preferences also break down by personality type: Extroverts love parties; Introverts want to die. 

Some offices give money to charity instead but then end up bringing in a deli tray on December 22^nd because it doesn’t feel right not to do something. I think it hits us that if we don’t have some kind of party, then we’re admitting that this is actually work and not really our family or our best friends. It’s one of the passive deceptions we engage in to smooth life along.

So what’s at the heart of this holiday ritual? Well, for starters we have strong cultural memories and it’s dark this time of year and we are longing for light. Workplaces have their own kind of darkness so it’s human to want to brighten that up too.

But there’s more. The office party is really a throwback. Yes, that sushi with sparkles affair in the boardroom is a remnant from the Ebenezer Scrooge days. It’s a flashback to the days when Big Daddy Corporation rewarded its Childlike Workers with the decent meal and glass of bubbly that they could never provide for themselves. The company party was also a time to reset any drifting notions of who owned the means of production.

I remember that kind of event. At the box factory where my Dad worked, the assembly line was shut down once a year: the Saturday before Christmas. Hot dogs were served from the corrugator and Santa arrived on a forklift. There were no Bring Your Kids to Work days back then, so the Christmas Party was how you saw where Daddy went every day. It was understood that that place and those people held the key to our family’s survival.

Today, in our workplaces, we play out that past. And despite all the tension it takes to get there, we’ll toast our teams with hopes for prosperity and pray for peace at work.