Wait until next year

Office decorations can be fun. But they are often enforced fun, which is no fun at all.

A senior member of staff suggests it might be a good time to get the Christmas decorations out, before quickly disappearing before they can actually get involved themselves. They leave as their gift a lingering pressure to find the decorations down in the basement, then the pressure to go out and buy whatever is missing, then the pressure to put all the decorations new and old up. You don’t really want to take part, then you think to yourself that you might as well not be the grumpy one for once and draping tinsel is probably a little more fun than working on a spreadsheet.

Then there is that one person, and there is always one, who still won’t take part. They would love to join in, but they have a very important report to file by the close of play and this brief festive activity really has to be parked to one side for them until they meet this vital deadline and pretty soon you realise that people really can talk in italics.

Then the very same senior member of staff who asked about Christmas decorations in the first place comes into the office and wonders aloud why this is taking so long, and before you know it you are being guilt-tripped for taking part in an activity they suggested in the first place.

The worst part of office decorations is that they invariably come down before the Christmas break anyway, so you get the bleak task and spectacle of packing away Christmas before it has even happened. And that job is left to those poor souls working right up to Christmas Eve. This never includes the person who wouldn’t take part in the first place. Nor that senior member of staff. They are both already on holiday, and booked it six months ago.