CHILDREN look forward to Christmas parties. Sane and sensible adults spend the rest of the year dreading them.
For children, Christmas parties mean balloons, party games and Santa Claus. For many adults, they mean the courtship of social catastrophe, sexual harassment under the mistletoe and blinding hangovers the following day.
The party season is purgatory. It gears up at the beginning of December with the cocktail celebrations for clients and office staff. It gathers speed between the 15th and 20th with invitations to the homes of friends - usually larger and better appointed than yours - to admire their merry festive decorations.
It hurtles through the nameless horrors of a family Christmas and, after a scarcely decent interval for repentance and recrimination, crashes into the alcoholic binge of the year on December 31. It then leaves its battered victims to face the cold grey dawn of a New Year with what is likely to be a sincere wish to simply die and be done with it.
Did I say purgatory? Make that hell. The Christmas party season is not there to be enjoyed - it is there to be endured, and the wise man or woman will have a survival strategy prepared well in advance of the onslaught of invitations.
The problems start when responding to invitations - there are no four initials in the alphabet more sinister than RSVP. For every invitation you accept, there will be another to a different party, taking place at exactly the same time and some considerable distance on the other side of the harbour. Which do you go to? Manufacture a convincing excuse and go to neither. Attempt to attend both and you will offend your host at the first by leaving early, and at the second by arriving late. Go to only one and someone who saw you there will mention the fact to whoever was throwing the other - this is particularly true of crucial, but slightly shaky, business connections.