Christmas parties revisited

I worked for my former job for 6 years, and the annual Christmas party was something we looked forward to every year.

Year 1 (2003) was at a nice local restaurant (that no longer exists) in a room just for us, with a silly $10 gift grab. I still have the plant today that I got in the gift grab!

Year 2 (2004) My boss had had a house built this year, so we had the party at his house. He hired a caterer and set up fancy tables. The twist this year was that we each had to bring some form of entertainment for the group, and it would be judged! The presentations were widely varied (I matched each co-worker with a breed of dog and explained why, one boss sang like Kermit the Frog, one co-worker made a work-related board game, one person wrote poetry). While fun, it was really stressful and I think made us all dislike this party the most. Competition doesn't fit well with a nice formal party!

Year 3 (2005) was the year of lavish gluttony. Our company was doing well, and the owners wanted to take us out to celebrate wealthy style! They had reserved the private wine cellar room at arguably one of the most expensive restaurants (for sure the most expensive steak restaurant) in town. Not only could we get whatever we wanted off of the menu (steaks started at $60 for JUST THE STEAK!), but we had appetizers galore, wine, and dessert. I still feel guilty to this day about how much that meal must have cost, but it was a one-in-a-lifetime experience.



Year 4 (2006) was my favorite party to date. It was our first year in the office space we owned (a cool old house), and my boss's hired the chef/somalier at a local winery to come cook us a 6 course meal with a wine pairing (from their vineyard of course) for each course. The wine was presented with an explanation about it and how it paired with the food being served. They rented tables and set up the office beautifully, and the food was amazing. The entire meal start to finish was 5 hours! We then each got to take home a bottle of wine from the vineyard.

Year 5 (2007) was a multi-pronged party. We started out a Sur La Table and had a cooking class (and we got to eat the food). I remember it being haricots verts and a meaty soup, but I know there was other stuff and it was very good and a unique twist on the usual dinner. We then walked a couple of blocks for a performance of A Christmas Carol. After the play, we had a private room at a local bar/restaurant for dessert and drinks. Although this was a fun year, I missed the ability to socialize more. I did learn about the greatness of meyer lemons though :)

Year 6 (2008) was at the View Point Inn, about a 45 minute drive for most of us. Part of Twilight was filmed here the same year as the party. It is a beautiful building with a gorgeous view. Unfortunately the party was in the evening, so we didn't get to enjoy it. We did enjoy the cocktail hour before dinner with the room just for us. Post-dinner we did a gift steal. The boss had given us each $20 for a gift. The best part of this steal was the rapid-fire dice tossing for the last minute. You got to steal the gift of your choice if you got doubles. We ended up with a gift certificate to a local restaurant, which was great.



Year 7 (2009) Unless I work for them doing some consulting in 2010 (fairly unlikely), this will be my last party. It's a tight year all around, so the plan is to start at the office with drinks and games, and have dinner at a local upscale grocery store that does dinners. We'll be doing the same gift steal as last year, although the twist is that the winner of the games gets final pick of the gift they want.

I'm going to miss these parties! I have so many great memories of the fun we've had and how appreciated we feel/felt as employees.

Grief

I feel very fortunate to have lost very few people in my life. Somehow though, the number being so small (3 main people come to mind) makes them feel infinitely more painful.

My grandfather died when I was 14 from ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease). Although he was a tough, strict, often unkind father to my mom and her 3 brothers, he was a fabulous grandfather. I was the first grandchild and we had a very close relationship. We used to spend hours, he and my grandma and me, doing the daily jumble and wordsearch from the "funnies" section of the paper. As my grandmother's eyesight began to fail from the ravages of macular degeneration, he and I would sit at the kitchen table and race to see who could get all of the words found from the wordsearch first. I vividly remember the first time ever that I beat him.

I thought I was finally smart enough to beat him.

Little did I know, but the horrible yet-to-be-diagnosed-disease that would take him from me made it very hard to him to make the fine motor movements to circle the letters in the puzzle.

In addition to word games, my grandpa and I spent hours gardening. He was a fastidious (some would say anal retentive) gardener. His garden consisted of 3 main flowers - fuchsias, which hung from baskets around the carport each summer, roses, which lined the "boulevard" in front of his house, and dahlias, which were the crux of the main small garden. If you know anything about gardening, you know that roses and fuchsias are messy flowers. When they start to die, they drop their flowers. Grandpa thought that it was a sin to have a stray petal in your garden, or a dead fuchsia on the ground. God forbid the dahlias grew too tall and started to bend before you got around to staking them.

My grandpa was an A+ gardener though, and never was an errant petal in the dirt for more than a day. The dahlias were staked from day one, and once weekly they were re-tied. He would walk around every evening and pluck the dying fuchsia flowers before they had a chance to fall. I loved gardening with him.

This summer, two major things happened that made me miss my grandpa. My husband and I bought our first house together, and my grandma moved out of the house she and my grandpa had owned since 1960. I wanted nothing more than to have grandpa help me plant some roses in my yard. I dreamed of the previously-loathed one day per year at Fred Meyer where scads of people line up because they pot your fuchsias for you. He wasn't there to help me. Not only that, but the dahlias that I had faithfully tied up at his house every year since his death were ripped out by the new owner of the house to make room for more grass. I cried over the loss of some stupid flower bulbs. Of course, it wasn't the bulbs I missed. I missed the last connection I had to my grandpa. I knew each time I trimmed the roses and tied up the dahlias that he was proud of me, happy that the neighbors weren't walking past his garden and thinking "Jim never would have let the petals fall off the roses like that."

I miss him. I miss him more as an adult than I did as a self-centered teenager. I have a garden, both in my yard and in my heart, that needs some tending.