No Holiday Party For You

We didn't go to the holiday party this year. I'm still not sure how I feel about this although I guess I'm okay with it considering I gave up my campaign to go on Wednesday. I don't even know why I was still trying to get MJ to go at that time when I never had any idea what I was going to wear in the first place.

We ALWAYS go to the company holiday party. Mine is an employee only lunch during the day for my department but his is a THING and we haven't missed one since he started working there. That's four years of holiday parties and I have documentation for all of them; 2010 here, 2011 here, 2013 here, and 2014 here. You know you've been blogging a long time when you have to use the search function on your blog to find your own posts. Normally the party is on a Saturday, there is a cheesy band and we get a hotel room for the night wherever they are having it, but this year they decided to make it a happy hour thing. Two years ago they moved it to January which actually worked out really well and this year they moved it back to December. On a Friday. At 4:30pm. Ugh. I find it difficult to pass up free drinks and a meal but there is something about a holiday party in December that feels really exhausting when all I can think about is making it to Christmas break. It finally got cold, it was supposed to rain, I'd have had to get off work early and I figured I wouldn't feel like bothering anyway so I said, "If you don't want to go, we aren't going. I'm over it."

That Friday we ate carne asada tacos for dinner out of paper containers, drank Bud Light and watched a movie. The weird thing is that he can't even tell me why he didn't want to go. He was actually on the committee this year and all he could say is that he wasn't feeling it.

What he was feeling, the second he heard about it was a co-worker's birthday party. For the last two years this guy has thrown a big birthday bash that we couldn't go to but he had no intention of missing it this year. And when I think about it, by the time I was one glass of wine in I thought it was a holiday party. It was downtown so we had to pay for parking just like usual. There was an open bar on the balcony. There was a nice little spread of finger foods and snacks. I'm still wondering what he did with all the furniture. All of it was removed so there was plenty of space for dancing. There was a nice sound system playing hit songs from this decade. I even got to see a ton of music videos on the synchronized TV that I would have never otherwise seen since I still haven't figured out where all the music videos have gone. That alone was so entertaining I spent the first hour of the party saying things like, "So that's who sings this song." It was the same crowd too. The co-worker friends that I see at every company holiday party, dodge ball, and kick ball game of year's past, were there. And so was MJ. I'll hang out with that guy almost anywhere; including the ER.

I think it's safe to say that we had fun.

No, it wasn't THE holiday party, but it's not too hard to convince myself that it was actually better. I didn't have to feel like a fool dancing to a cover band on an empty dance floor. I didn't have to shop for a dress or figure out which one I was going to recycle. There were Costco wraps and chocolate chip cookies which I love and the house wine was a sweet white moscato. Drink tickets at the company holiday party NEVER include moscato. Also, I'm not so sure I would have survived going out two nights in a row. We are on a two party night per year average right now. Our last one was Las Vegas in August so I figure we will be due for another around June.

The only thing missing was the raffle prizes and we never win those anyway.