I can only assume that my company’s decision to have its Christmas party in mid-November was for exclusively economic reasons. Perhaps it is cheaper to rent out a vineyard for a November night than it is for a December night. That sounds like us. And it would have to have been significantly cheaper because the vineyard in question was in the farthest flung corner of west Auckland and necessitated a road train of no less than four buses (one was double-decker) to get us all there. Us minus partners, of course, because partners weren’t invited.

Needless to say no one was in a remotely Christmassy mood, not that anyone ever is, anymore. In fact, on the day in question, no one, except for me, seemed even the tiniest bit excited. Tragically, when you work for a newspaper, Fridays are your busiest days. You’re struggling to get half of next week’s advertising down to production who won’t have a bar of it because they’re desperately trying to fit all of Saturday’s editorial around the advertising space you have managed to sell for the weekend. (Yes, that’s how it works. Advertising comes first. If there is a terrorist attack in Queenstown, well, that’s just too bad. They’ll wrap an extra sheet of newsprint with the terrorist story around the existing paper and keep on printing. Welcome to the twenty first century.) So while we all may have been inwardly excited at the prospect of a forty five minute bus trip out to a vineyard for free booze and a meal that would likely consist of tired salad and cold meat selected from a buffet (I was proved right) no one was showing any interest in the lead up to our departure.

Not that I’m ungrateful. Far from it, I had an excellent time. All the office party experiences you’re doubtless about to endure; the woman crying when three other employees tell them how much they respect her, the plots to get the people you don’t like fired, the re-forging of old alliances and the drunken promises of new ones, the terrible, terrible dancing to My Sharona, the hitting on the new team members, I got to partake of all this in the truly picturesque surrounds of a celebrated New Zealand micro-vineyard. (I did my group-hugging of one tearful guest surrounded by actual grapevines, the perfect visual metaphor for office gossip.)

This column is not going to be a blow-by-blow account of my Christmas party because no one in their right mind would be remotely interested (hi mum!). This column is going to be about how one gradually pieces together an account of what exactly one did or said on the night in question.

Now, socially speaking, office parties are always a high-risk situation. You spend all your time in the pressure-cooker environment of a target-driven workplace, simultaneously loathing and respecting the people around you. In a million years you wouldn’t pick the vast majority of them as friends but, especially after a few New Zealand wines, you start to realise you actually have a reasonable amount of admiration for them. After all, they put up with the same kind of crap that you have to put up with, day-in, day-out. And you decide to tell them so. This is the beginning of the end.

Oscar Wilde once said that travel is only glamorous in retrospect. Office parties are only shameful in retrospect. This was brought home to me as I pieced together the previous evening at a weekend barbecue amongst actual, non-work friends.

One of the funny side effects of telling someone you write a weekly column is they tend to suck in their stomachs immediately after you mention it. Like you’re going to write something about how all the people you meet are total fatsos.

Anyway, at this fatso barbecue the Saturday after my office Christmas party I began to walk them through my previous evening. Now I thought I was reasonably well-behaved on the night, and to some extent I was. Well, I wasn’t the worst behaved on the night, that honour goes to the Egyptian guy who was thrusting and gyrating at everyone one the bus ride back to work in the middle of the night.

Over a couple of dozen daytime beers, I began placing all my exploits in chronological order. There was the afore-mentioned hugging, there was the sincere promising to attend a wedding in Ireland I clearly can’t afford to be at, there was the twisting of my knee on the dance floor in front of dozens of colleagues, there was the midnight phone calls from my deskto co-workers who had ditched us earlier, there was the abandonment of two essential members of my department on the waterfront, there was the ending up on the other side of the city at another co-worker’s house where I proceeded to throw up in her sink and then bed down with her. (I’m a total fag so there was obviously no funny business, but I vaguely remember something being said when her husband came home from a dance party hours later.)

So, while it may not beat ending up in Sydney Harbour (as in floating around in the water), which has happened to me at other work events, I actually like my new job in New Zealand, and was understandably concerned as to the potential fall out from the Christmas party. I have it on good authority that my current employer is renowned for its raucous work do’s so I’ve got that in my favour. Also in my favour is the fact that I didn’t cry, get naked or have sex with anyone (loser!). Just make sure you won’t do any of these things yourself when that fateful evening rolls around and at least try not to replicate any of the things I actually ended up doing. Because the more I think about it, Santa starts to look like some fairy tale witch cut from the same cloth as that apple lady in Snow White.  When you run through all the things that could potentially go down at an office Christmas party, his words sound as ominous as Freddy Krueger’s, like he’s offering you a glass of absinthe and a line of cocaine. “Merry Christmas to all, and to all… A good night.”

Gordon White lives in Auckland where he drinks heavily and works for the New Zealand Herald. There is a volcano at the end of his street. He mentions this often.