It is quite fashionable to claim to hate work Christmas parties, which doesn’t mean you actually hate them, it just conveys disdain for the people for whom a work-organised drinking binge represents the pinnacle, the very walnut on top of their social whirl. But there are people who genuinely do hate work parties, because the grim half-memories that come rushing back, the dimly lit humiliations and shudders of self-abasement that barely add up to true recollections, are more like a dream or post-traumatic stress disorder. None of the following advice will help, since you still have to turn up, and it is still your own psyche you are wrestling with. But some Christmas party nightmares are not your fault.

Christians have worked hard to divert the festival away from its true meaning by loading it with animals, babies, wisdom and salvation. Originally, it was a carnival, in the anthropological not the fairground sense: a pressure valve for the constraints of daily life, a time-limited period of raging misrule, in which all hierarchies and duties were suspended. Those roots are the ones that run deepest in our collective psyches, the expression of which is drinking and taboo-breaking. Nobody wants to break a taboo on Christmas Day, when taboos and Baileys are the only things keeping it all together. It is only fun to break stuff in public. Being drunk and over-stepping the line are related, but not casually: everyone assumes afterwards that the inappropriate thing happened because a given person had dropped their inhibitions. But you have to ask how the chocolate penis arrived under the work tree addressed to the handsy guy in accounts in the first place.

Taking as read that it is in the DNA of the Christmas party to be a big sack of regrets waiting to happen, there are signals that it is going to be worse than that – career-endingly worse – which cluster into the following categories.

Fancy-dress theme



Society never reveals as much about its underlying anxieties as when it tries to make risque jokes about them. Recently, there has been a surge in class-taboo-breaking; Durham university’s rugby club floating the idea of a miners versus Thatcher fancy-dress party, and a supper club in east London launching a themed cockney evening for £55 a head. Look, Christmas is the season for saying the thing you’re not allowed to say. But if the reason you couldn’t say that thing is because it is disgusting – for instance: “Isn’t it hilarious when whole regions are cast into despair by de-industrialisation, then we get to occupy them as playgrounds” – it is a fair bet that your party will also be disgusting, full of vomit and straw and bad people.

The perennial controversial theme is the one where you get to drop all that equality shit and admit that you would prefer it if women were dressed up as saucy sex workers and men were dressed as varieties of professional men. Classically, this was the tarts and vicars party, which fell out of vogue not because it was sexist but because it was the 80s, and therefore only people in home counties golf clubs still did it (note: anything they do in a golf club should be a red flag for an office party nightmare, except for the game itself, as long as it is mini).

The central message – women are whores and men are regular, if playful and undignified – was carried over into the school disco craze of the start of the century, and complicated new coinages with a racist undertone. A friend of mine’s office floated a West Coast rap theme, to which all the women objected, because it was basically pimps and hoes, which itself is basically tarts and vicars. But, conceptually, it would have been vicars and tarts with extra bling – aren’t those West Coast rappers vulgar, objectifying women and spending all their money on gold instead of Isas?

For ages, the battle of the sexes dominated the taboo-breaking scene, with the odd Nazi thrown in, but only among the incredibly posh: the last people standing for whom eschewing totalitarian sadists still carried the tiny, thrilling frisson that you might not really.

Venue

My first job was with an Australian publisher and we all got paid in cash, for reasons that are still totally opaque to me. To avoid getting mugged, all 60 of us would walk together in a crocodile formation to the bank on the high street, then we would go to a pub, probably Walkabout, that had straw on the floor. Let’s just say it was precautionary not decorative. Nobody behaved any better than an average horse. Avoid straw.

Christmas parties on boats are booked on the understanding that nobody really wants to be there, so you have to find some way to stop them leaving. I want to say the worst that can happen is that it will be boring but, realistically, the worst that can happen is that a boring person will try to make it less boring, and the only way they’ll know how to do that is by playing spin the bottle.

Karaoke bars, Madame Tussauds, bowling alleys – these are all schemes to bring solidarity to an office whose overlords feel is insufficiently bonded. But they are also incredibly expensive, and – not coincidentally – the office is plenty bonded, just by dissatisfaction. Every conversation will be about how come they could afford Frankenstein but they couldn’t afford an inflation-meeting pay rise.

Jumpers

Many offices, maybe to avoid the fancy-dress minefield, just specify a Christmas jumper, which has evolved at record speed to mean not just seasonal colourways, but flashing LEDs and life-sized applique carrots. It is very infantilising, like being made to wear a bobble hat on a school trip in case you get lost. But the main problem is that they are way too hot, until you take them off, and then you are naked (see Nudity).

Secret Santa



It is such an inherently flawed proposition: you have to give somebody a gift, but it can’t be more than £5. You have to express something to them, but to do that with a fiver, you have to know them incredibly well or they have to be children. The potential to give offence is vast; just in the arena of personal hygiene, it is astonishing how many ways there are to misread a gift item. Nervous and insecure, everyone falls back on a joke but, again, to make a five-pound joke that is obviously a joke, that says something unique about a person but isn’t against them, jeez, anyone who can do this with confidence should immediately quit their job and go and work for I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue.

In the old days, I used to buy people the ultimate utility item: a pack of fags. Everyone is a smoker by midnight on 19 December. But now, thanks to the extraordinary economics of legal and illegal drugs, you couldn’t even get 10 for a fiver. It is cheaper to get them an E.

Nudity



Nobody announces in advance that they plan to end up naked. But it is amazing how often somebody does. Sometimes there is a Weinstein edge, the expression of power and dominance through impunity. Sometimes it is an exhibitionist streak, buried year round and set loose by the sensory cocktail of flashing lights and booze. Perhaps it is your final frontier, shedding the armour of your corporate uniform to reveal the flesh-and-blood human underneath (for the unaccustomed drinker, being incredibly drunk can have that literal-minded quality of a dream). Sometimes the rhythm takes you, and sometimes you are just too hot. All of those things can happen, and not always to bad people.

There is a famous thought experiment in resilience-building: if someone is intimidating you, you imagine them on the toilet, and their authority evaporates. If you have stood naked before your co-workers, that person in your mind’s eye with no seriousness, envisaged in direst indignity, will be you. I can’t say for certain that it damages prospects for promotion; it just slowly acidulates all your interactions until you have become a nothing, a shrivelled pea, an embittered self. So, really, if you’ve already done it, don’t sweat it.

It doesn’t have to be this way ...



An inoffensive party is in some shared civic space that serves alcohol; let’s call it a pub. It is easily accessible, both inwards and outwards. Its theme is … it doesn’t have a theme; themes are for interior designers and teenagers. The playlist is a song – the best song, the least Christmassy song, whichever – from every year since the date of birth of the oldest person, in order, and nobody bangs on about which that person is. The food is beige, beige, beige: people are anti a lot of food that is pink, and allergic to a lot of food that is white, but nobody minds food that is beige.

An inoffensive party guest always carries two drinks, so they can say: “Gotta go, this drink is for X,” when they are bored, or stay and drink two drinks when they are not. They don’t use the event as an opportunity for any declaration, whether love or home truth. I never got senior enough to work out this rule for myself, and had to be told, but the more authority you have, the earlier you should leave. I can be even more specific than that, knowing the British culture and economy the way I do; if you’re in charge, stay until the free drinks run out (which will be a nano-second), buy a round, then leave. Continue in strict hierarchical order until everyone in charge has left, the interns have had 17 drinks, and the straw is starting to look like genius. It is not very carnivalesque, but it works.