The Holiday Party from Hell

Last night Free-Floating Hostility was guests at a Christmas party hosted by an editor at the paper. Mike went last year and told me I had to go this year "so that you can understand." Indeed, his description hardly conveyed the full effect.

Our host (whom I have promised not to name) begins putting up Christmas decorations the day after Halloween and finishes just in time for his annual party. Blinking colored lights cover the front of the house from top to bottom and side to side, then sprawl over the lawn and a trellis constructed over the path to the back room. Cutouts of the Grinch and other trademarked holiday cartoons are posed sinisterly underneath two flashing signs reading "Santa Checks his list...TWICE!!!!" and "Don't just park and look, turn on 106.4 AM", this last because our host pirates radio waves for two months out of the year in order to broadcast Christmas carols to approximately four houses. An electric train runs overhead as you wander, stunned, to the back door, where the host greets his "friends" and coworkers.

The interior of the house is full of snoopy-related merchandise of every description from handbells to impressionist watercolors. One of the party games prepared for this occasion is Count the Snoopies. I don't know if some kind of meaty prize was involved, but certain older guests were taking the party games very seriously, and harrumphed at me indignantly for standing in front of a snoopy and throwing off their count.

We made our way to the kitchen where our host's surprisingly normal wife was offering cider and mild humor (we stopped to greet Mike's ex-boss who left the paper to write Christian Young Adult fiction and who by the end of the night was overheard imitating Snoop Dogg) and took our place by the artfully arranged Williams Sonoma chocolates and a TV displaying a DVD of a crackling fireplace. Our host sidled up and asked if we had seen the second story. "There's more?" I said faintly. There was. A whole floor dedicated to floor-to-ceiling shelves of snoopies and woodstocks and another electric train running around the base of a snoopy-festooned Christmas tree.

When we made our way back downstairs a circle of dazed twenty-something couples had formed at the base of the stairs. Only one of the six, an agriculture grad student, had the good sense to be drunk. He was valiantly keeping up the conversation by telling stories of the time he was riding his bike when something crossed his path and caused him to "eat it," which I took to mean that he fell. The story went something like "I just ate it, and the guys driving were like, man, some guy just ate it." One other member of the circle, a firefighter, made a good effort to laugh. I tried to share the story about the kid I knew from Browning who was running and collided with a van that was standing still, but no one laughed. "It happens," the guy who ate it responded sympathetically. I've met these people before, and they're perfectly lively and interesting, but something about this purgatory of a party sucked their will to live and used it to power an electric festival of crap.

After one hour that felt like twelve we made a polite exit and went home feeling more Jewish than we've ever felt in our lives. Happy Holidays.