We hear Yahoo is canceling its annual "Year End Party" for 2009. That's quite a change for a company that last year held three company parties and additional bashes at the departmental level, amid layoffs.

New York Observer columnist Simon Doonan writes truth: "People HATE gift guides, universally."

Goldman's Christmas celebration rules have a funny condition: they can't hang out in groups of twelve or more.

Goldman Sachs employees received a voicemail announcement instructing them not to organize private Christmas parties for the firm's employees even at their own homes, a person familiar with the matter said.

Just in time for Christmas, AOL is asking 2,500 of its workers to volunteer for buyouts starting Dec. 4 (layoffs come after) as the company separates from Time Warner and a shadow of its former online conglomerate self.

Adobe will lay off 680 people, or nearly 10 percent of its workforce. The publishing software company joins Electronic Arts and AOL in making pre-Thanksgiving cutbacks. At least these workers won't be shocked during the holidays. Just broke. (Pic)

'Tis the season to rush up layoffs so they don't fall in the sacrosanct Thanksgiving-to-Christmas period: An AOL insider tells us the company is slated to let go around 100 people tomorrow, following 1,500 firings Electronic Arts announced today.

Bob Dylan's much-anticipated Christmas album is out. And — huzzah — it doesn't sound horrible. Still, you can't help but imagine Dylan as a drunken interloper who stumbled into choir rehearsal at a prim suburban church.

Ohh Hoda Kotb. The perpetually drunk Today Show hostess was celebrating St. Paddy's day pretty hard on-air this morning. Over at CBS, they were only pretending to drink. Take a cue, Hodes.

You just know Mike Sidel's Weather Channel colleagues will give him endless shit for slipping in the snow live on MSNBC Sunday. Instead of the ice at Wisconsin's Lambeau Field, blame Christmas!

MTV tacked on a $500 stocking stuffer to the final paychecks of those charity bloggers it was avoiding paying. Could it be the raunchy Viacom network believes in God? Or at least karma?

Even Christmas was a disappointment this year. Can we move on to 2009 already? This week, it was the holi-daze!

The holiday season gives an ever-scrutinized media elite the one true liberation: That feeling no one's really watching! The madness descends in this clip from Fox and Friends:

When you get laid off, you have to give people a new way to get in touch with you. Now we're regretting that, unlike Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici, we never became an "accidental Facebook slut."

Rolling Stone overlord Jann Wenner forgot to do some layoffs in his last round, two weeks ago, so he just fired some more people, less than a week before Christmas.

Marie Claire just wanted to wish everyone a "sparkling, joyful and warm holiday," but the magazine's flack forgot to Bcc, exposing precious celebrity email addresses to 582 people. Christmas is ruined!

Other publishers are cutting back on holiday parties and bonuses, but not Arianna Huffington! It's designer sweaters for her long-suffering employees again this year. So long as they do an advertorial "thank you."

Gloria Vanderbilt's youngest son has been using his mother as a foil since he appeared on the Tonight Show with her at age three. Anderson Cooper more recently brought his mother onto CNN to passive-aggressively scold him on Mother's Day and to provide the silver fox some sensible, embarrassing advice on the occasion of his 40th birthday. So when Cooper recently declined to invite his mother on a holiday trip to Egypt — "No! I wasn't going to take my mom," he told a befuddled David Letterman — she was ruthless in her revenge. You might not acknowledge that's what's going on, Anderson, but it's plain as day to the rest of us. (We're speaking of the revenge, of course.) Video after the jump

Next Monday, Rupert Murdoch is planning a big bash for wife Wendi Deng Murdoch's 40th birthday on the Gramercy Park Hotel roof that has a six-figure budget and folks like Nicole Kidman and Barry Diller on the guest list. It's such a big deal that Murdoch made Michael Wolff (hey, did you hear he has a book coming out?) move his party for The Man Who Owns the News to Tuesday, according to Jeff Bercovici. They both sound like fabulous affairs. Especially compared to the staff Christmas party that the New York Post announced yesterday. News Corp. canceled its regular company-wide holiday bash last month. So, instead next Friday the staff are heading to their regular Midtown watering hole, Langan's. With a cash bar. Aside from the promised "sexy elves" and "special theme rooms," it'd be tough to tell this from any other Friday night at Langan's. Full invite after the jump.

What would you do if an old man broke into your house in the middle of the night and tried to pleasure your children? We would leave him milk and cookies. No, silly! We're not talking about creepy Mr. Pryzborowski down the street. We're talking about Santy Claus! Who, actually, can be pretty creepy himself. What with the beard and chortling and likely booze-stink. In fact, just in time for the holidays, Flabbergastedly has a little gallery of photos of children being terrified by Father Christmas (culled, it seems, from this bigger list) that we find delightfully funny. Look at a couple of our favorites after the jump.