Roman Holidays

"The annual Office Party starts along about noon on December 24 and ends two or three months later, depending on how long it takes the boss to find out who set fire to his waste basket, threw the water cooler out the window, and betrayed Miss O'Malley in the men's washroom." So wrote the New Yorker's Corey Ford in his 1951 humor book, The Office Party, which the cover proclaimed "a hilarious commentary on . . . a business world phenomenon."

But the reality of the overwrought holiday fete could be decidedly unfunny. Fights broke out. Merrymakers were injured or killed in car accidents on the way home. And periodically the party was the venue for homicide, usually over a romance gone bad.

In 1939, in New York City, an ink company paymaster shot to death a female employee at the office Christmas party, then killed himself.

Police, lawyers, members of the clergy and company supervisors took notice. Party misconduct was unhealthy for the firm -- and bad for employees and their families. Court cases would later find employers liable for death or injury incurred by employees who got drunk at holiday office parties. And the old-fashioned pass at the secretary was no longer a joke.

In 1953, the new Republican administration decided to enforce an old regulation against drinking in government buildings and halt the seasonal party held at the State Department, traditionally hosted by the press. Aghast, one letter writer protested: "The face of official Washington has been permanently changed!"

But times were changing. "Maybe if the malpractice is sufficiently exposed," a popular Washington newspaper columnist wrote in the early 1960s, "the whole office-partying program will go into discard."

Then came the go-go '70s and '80s, and an interest in the psychology of corporate culture. It turned out a company was a living being, like an amoeba, and had needs. Who knew? One thing a company needed was happy employees, and happy employees needed to have fun. And -- Hail, Caesar! -- the best way to have fun was to party!

There were, of course, many ways to have company fun. These were revealed via surveys conducted by PhDs. Wells Fargo, it was learned, had an employee awards program that included, among other prizes, a bag of garden fertilizer provided by horses that pulled the company stagecoach.

Ben and Jerry's ice cream makers had a "joy gang," to plan company festivities. There was a list of the top 30 business motivational songs, numbers such as "Put a Little Love in Your Heart" and "We Are Family." This was serious.

In 1979, the Boeing Co. got into the Guinness Book of World Records for its two-day holiday blast for 103,000 people in the Seattle Kingdome. A big Wisconsin-based printing company once had a Yule party with the founder dressed as an admiral leading executives dressed as sailors in songs from what they called "HMS Printafor."

But there were places where ancient traditions lived on. Washington, for example.

Here, according to many accounts, the most memorable holiday office parties were those thrown by the now-defunct Goldberg/Marchesano advertising firm. These were old-fashioned, jam-packed, Saturnalian affairs held in the agency's four-story townhouse headquarters just south of Dupont Circle.