Originally published in On Our Selection News December 1, 2016

It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

December is officially here and that means the Christmas parties are coming.

Loose Christmas parties are so engrained in the westernized capitalist culture – like sausage sizzles or casual sexism.

Whether they’re work, friends or family gatherings, things tend to spiral further out of control than usual when you add “Christmas” before “party”. And shame is often attached.

Because when it’s a work party and you’re in a small team, you’re going to have to think of an actual story as to why you couldn’t find your shoes. Someone is going to notice if you’re doubling up on the potatoes. And you’re definitely not going to be able to quietly slip away for private cheeky vom – someone important is going to drive you home and they’re absolutely going to see you empty the contents of your stomach like someone’s spraying it out with Gerni pressure washer from the other end (happened to a friend of a friend of mine *coughs*).

You can’t get away with the classic Christmas party antics like you would in a larger group, because there’s no one to pass the blame on to. So you try to keep yourself in check. This however, rarely works (hence the power spew anecdote).

This year I’ve been invited to a few Christmas parties. One has just gone, another is this weekend.

The first was reasonably successful: I kept it together long enough to not ruin a group photo, snuck in a powernap and ate the weight of a female echidna in potato-based snacks (echidnas are standard units of measurement now)

But my upcoming one is a concern, because it’s going to be on a bigger scale. I’ve never been to a Christmas party with more than 20 people on the guest list and usually more than half of those people have seen my “thrust walk” dance move – so they generally know what I’m about.

But this time, I’m going in cold. I haven’t had time to gradually introduce many of these people to my horrendous character traits and I’m worried they’re all going to come out at once.

When there are deep fried balls of things in front of me, I get greedy. When Working Class Man comes on, I get shouty. When the dance floor is jumping, I get thrust-y. I’m not ready for people to see that.

Also, it’s a dress up party. And the only costume idea I have is that dead cat one of the traumatised cops keeps in her freezer in the first season of Underbelly. My friend/person in charge of minimising my self-inflicted humiliation strongly advises me against it. Which is probably good advice, considering I would need a human-sized freezer bag for the costume to be effective.

It’s a worry, because if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from televised Christmas specials and life (the ultimate sitcom) is that Christmas parties tend to bring out the real person.

Something about fake antlers and free wine cracks the carefully-construct façade.

And because the real me is what it is, embarrassing myself is inevitable.

But then, humiliation is a small price to pay for free potato-based snacks.