Roman Holidays

"What is the company policy here at Christmas?" a secretary asks during the party scene in the 1957 romantic comedy "Desk Set."

"Anything goes," comes the reply. "As long as you don't lock the doors."

The modern holiday office party can be traced to Victorian England, where novelist Charles Dickens is often credited with returning Christmas celebration to fashion, especially with the publication of his book A Christmas Carol the week before the holiday in 1843.

At one point in the story, the anti-Christmas Ebenezer Scrooge is shown in a dream the benevolence of his former employer, a jolly chap called "Old Fezziwig." The scene is Fezziwig's annual Christmas party, which may be the first depiction in modern English literature of a holiday office party.

"The floor was swept and watered, the lamps were trimmed, fuel was heaped upon the fire," Dickens wrote. "The warehouse was as snug, and warm, and dry, and bright a ball-room, as you would desire to see upon a winter's night.

"In came a fiddler with a music-book," he wrote. "In came all the young men and women employed in the business . . . In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the baker . . . There was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer."

A ghost points out to Scrooge how very easy it was for Fezziwig to make his employees happy.

The idea of employer benevolence went on to dominate holiday office parties as the 19th century gave way to the 20th. The custom was for the employer to appear among the workers and literally hand out money. Old newspaper files are filled with notices of the annual Christmas party thrown by this corporation or that, with the boss walking the shop floor handing out cash. On Christmas Eve 1929, C.W. Nash, president of the old Nash Motor Co., of Kenosha, Wis., gave out more than $800,000 in cash and gifts.

The giving of the Christmas bonus often was followed by eating and dancing. And drinking.

In Dickens's day, there was the cozy holiday beverage "smoking bishop," a brew of port, red wine, oranges, cloves and sugar. And Fezziwig's negus was a mix of wine, sugar, spices and fruit that was heated with a fireplace poker.

As the decades passed, though, office party drinks became more, uh, straightforward. And their consumption, and related misconduct, became mythical.

Lore from the middle of the last century tended to reference one Smithers, from accounting, who got loaded and told off the boss, who was chasing Miss Crabtree around the water cooler, while everybody downed the wicked broth cooked up by the boys in the print shop. Spouses, by the way, were not invited to those affairs.