The Office Holiday Party

I didn’t realize that office holiday parties were a #thing until my company flew its East Coast employees out to its San Francisco headquarters for a week of holiday festivities. Most of this past week was spent doing our usual work in an overcrowded office that resembled the library during finals week, complete with lots of snacks and socializing. The intended team bonding part of the week took hold during many cheese-plated happy hours and in the filming of a holiday movie that required me to be in a San Francisco alleyway at 7 AM one morning to reenact a scene from West Side Story, an activity that would’ve been more fun if there hadn’t been human feces ingrained in the pavement. This spirit-week-on-steroids that I’ve signed myself up for comes to an end tonight with a holiday party/movie screening, which brings me to the topic of this post: office holiday parties.

The office holiday party is one of those things that us newly minted members of the workforce have previously only seen in movies (um, Love Actually)--who knew people approached them with such tenacity in real life? When I arrived in San Francisco last Saturday, my sister and brother-in-law told me of not one, but two, work parties they might have to attend that night. I’ve also been keeping tabs on the tent that’s taken a week to erect at the Levi headquarters courtyard that I pass on the way to work. Be it a potluck, a happy hour, or a karaoke night, most of us have a holiday event with our co-workers in the next week, so what the eff are we going to wear?

I’m wearing a dress that I got at the Brimfield Antique Show this past September. I’ll save the details of Brimfield for another post, but here’s some context for how the dress came to be my chosen office party costume: Brimfield is a massive antiques market in Massachusetts that happens three times a year. I haggled the price of the dress from 28 to 23 dollars (5 dollars is a lot for the #underpaid), and my live-in seamstress (#mymom) shortened it about 5 inches. It looks like a tunic dress, and it has a pink and gold metallic paisley print and a gold braid weaving down the front. It’s apparently handmade, which is believable because I found a bee hive in the right armpit. I’m pairing it with black tights and Zara booties, and I CAN’T WAIT!

If I hadn’t found my outfit four months earlier, I probably would’ve been scurrying up and around Market Street looking for a dress to wear tonight. If I had more funds to my name, I would’ve express ordered something from Net-a-Porter. For the purpose of this post and because I love playing fantasy closet, below are some holiday office party outfit ideas.

Miu Miu jacket, Markus Lupfer blouse, Edie Parker clutch, J.Crew cafe capri, Christopher Kane floral skirt, DKNY pumps,  Elizabeth Cole bracelet, Nicholas Kirkwood pumps, Dannijo necklace