The Christmas party for AutoAlliance Thailand really had it all: Bottle throwing, gun shots and homemade hand grenades. It all started peacefully enough; the company's 4,000 person staff gathered at a restaurant in Chonburi, roughly 60 miles south of Bangkok, for a night full of holiday cheer and prizes.
Harper's was so thoroughly impressed with its clever ironic Christmas party that the monthly officially sent us an invitation. Not so that we could, you know, actually attend, but just so that we, too, might admire the wit behind a "Black Tie & Pizza" gathering, complete with an illustration of precious bow-tied editors and unpaid interns in flowing gowns bought by daddy, all eating — HA! — the Italian pies we've all heard so very much about. Black tie is oh-so-cleverly optional. And you might as well drink up your "Kill Fee" cocktail, because you're probably not getting the paper kind for quite some time! Read all about it after the jump.
We stand corrected! Not everyone is canceling their Christmas parties. Magazine publishing biggie Bauer (InTouch, Life & Style) is having a "Bauer on Broadway" Christmas party in Weehawken, where you can perform your favorite showtune with a live band! The only drawback? It costs a whopping $170 to bring a spouse or significant other (or, you know, drunken friend) to the shinding. Which is funny because, as a tipster puts it, that kind of "encourages infidelity." If it's too expensive to bring a date, then you'll be at a dateless party with a bunch of your sloshy coworkers and, well, workplace awkwardness can happen. Though it is in New Jersey, and getting extramarital nookie across state lines isn't really cheating anyway. See the full invite below.
Newsweek has come up with the worst rationale yet for canceling the annual holiday party: The magazine said it is sacrificing the Christmastime shindig to have any even more awesome party in April. Because spring is totally the time you want to be partying late with coworkers, and the sun goes down three hours later (7:39ish vs. 4:30), so management doesn't have to worry about people punching out early. We suppose this sounds better than "we want to reduce the chances of having to fire you all amid the rapidly accelerating implosion of print media and Western capitalism, just like Condé Nast, Viacom, Hearst ABC News and News Corp. before us." The internal memo is after the jump.
Oh no! Bad things are happening to the already trod-upon desolate dead-eyed employees of the mighty Hearst Company! The magazine business sucks, and the economy's cratering, and CosmoGirl closed, so Hearst has decided that this year there will be no Hearst Christmas Party. Ye gods! Last year the party already moved from Tavern on the Green to their office (it's a big fancy brand-new office, but still), who knew there was yet more indignity to be suffered. This is a bad sign, for America. Now we are officially in another depression. Surely William Randolph Hearst threw opulent Christmas parties during the Great Depression, right? (Well, the Depression saw Hearst lose control of his company and sell off many of his vast and glorious treasures. But he still threw parties dammit.) This Depression must be even Greater! It's official! The only chance Hearst has of making it through the coming dark times is to gin up support for a foreign war, probably. Can we get Marie Claire to work on the Spanish threat, people? The fate Christmas itself hangs in the balance!
Evite released stats this week revealing that somehow, December 15th is the partyingest day of the entire year. Evites have been sent for 100,000 parties on that dreadful Saturday. According to Citysearch, "in New York alone, there are already 8,000 parties planned for a total of 275,000 invited guests, making New York the No. 1 'Super Saturday' party city in the U.S." That's more parties than New Year's Eve, Halloween, and the Super Bowl. And it needs to stop.
