How to organise a bleak self-employed Christmas party

EVEN if you are self-employed, you can still organise a work Christmas party where you end up drunkenly humiliating yourself.

Here’s how to have a workplace Christmas party even if you just work alone in a cold, empty home office.

Get very drunk very quickly
If you are celebrating solo there’s no boring conversation to slow down the key business of drinking. Bonus points if you sneak off to the loo and pretend to snort a line of talcum powder.

Hit on yourself, a pet or an inanimate object
In the days that you worked with other human beings, you could at least chat up other human beings. Now your choices of life form will likely be limited to the cat or a spider plant. Alternately try to have sex with a chair.

Quietly slag off the bastard who won’t let you have more money
Wish you earned more money but you’re being held back by that lazy bastard who can’t be bothered to do any work? That bastard is you.

Get a bit cocky and tell yourself you are a twat
Always wanted to tell your boss to his face that he’s a petty, under-qualified jobsworth? That’s you too, so go for it, and throw in a badly aimed punch for good measure.

Freak out that you’re going to sack yourself and start crying
Wake up the next morning with a stabbing headache and a creeping dread about what happened the night before. Spend all morning convinced the cat is giving you funny looks, then confide tearfully in the spider plant, wrapping its consoling tendrils around your sobbing, naked frame.

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What sort of nauseatingly middle-class Christmas are you having?

CHRISTMAS is full of wonderful opportunities to be sickeningly middle class, but what sort of bourgeois poncery is right for you? Read our guide for inspiration.

Foodie Christmas

A Christmas totally dominated by agonisingly trivial conversations about prosciutto and storing aubergines in oil that make normal people want to ram Nigel Slater’s baked marrow up your arse.

Guardian Christmas

Christmas with a strong focus on fun things like ethical consumerism and hand-wringing liberal guilt. Presents should be things like oven gloves made by homeless people showing ‘Mrs Santa’ delivering the gifts in a two-fingered salute to Santa’s oppressive, patriarchal present-delivering monopoly.

Upper-middle class Christmas

Incredibly expensive Richard Curtis film-style Christmas for people who do not realise paying £600 for a tree is insane. Crackers will contain a silver hip flask or Fitbit rather than a cellophane fish that purports to reveal your personality. May also involve skiing in Switzerland and “Portia and Hugo bringing their cellos over”.

Educational Christmas

Favoured by ambitious parents, an educational Christmas requires it to be turned into a dreary learning experience about random facts like the natural habitat and diet of reindeer and however Anglo-Saxons celebrated it in their huts. Ideally should involve school-style ‘activity sheets’ and a test on Christmas day for extra fun.

Eco bullshit Christmas

No ‘factory farmed’ turkey here, but instead you will enjoy a wild organic goose that was killed non-invasively by being chased around a meadow until it collapsed. May also involve the dreaded ‘nut roast’ and scraping leftovers into the compost heap while chanting a Pagan hymn of thanks to Mother Earth.