Another Christmas Party

Our department's Christmas party was on Tuesday. A different group/lab organizes the festivities every year. This year's group put a lot of work into it.

The evening began at 5:30 with a "welcoming drink". Then we were divided up into teams (about a dozen teams of 10-12 people) - by picking random neuro-diseases out of a bucket and grouping with others "having the same disease". We were then sent to different competition stations. At the first one we went to, there was a plastic bag containing mouse pellets. After holding the bag, we had to guess how much the mouse chow weighed. At the second station, we were timed to see how fast we could fill in a box of yellow pipet tips. Third was the "rat race". We were each given a windup rat that we placed on a starting line. The distance of the rat that went the furthest from the starting line was recorded. (This wasn't very far since they basically went in circles.) Lastly, each person on the team blew up a balloon and stood in a line. The first person turned and hugged the second person with the balloon between them until the balloon popped. This continued down the line and they kept track of how long it took for all the balloons to pop.

Next up was the dinner, which was a Julbord, in the lunchroom. (The picture above is from the dinner.) We were seated at the tables by team. Each table had a bottle of snaps, a box of wine, and cans of beer. Additionally, there was a song booklet with the Swedish snaps songs. Since there were ~125 people in the room, the singing (and, therefore, snaps drinking) was initiated quite often. Throughout the dinner, there were other competitions. In one, we had to match a list of fun facts to the corresponding person on the party organizing committee. In another, they showed powerpoint slides of the department administrators' legs - and we had to guess who they belonged to. The last and most painful competition was held while we were eating dessert - the kareoke competition!

For the kareoke competition, each team had to get up an perform a song. My team was first and we chose Take a Chance on Me because we felt an ABBA song would be appropriate. It was horrible! It would have been hilarious had the song been 1 minute long but it was just cruel to make everyone suffer through the entire thing! I thought that it couldn't get any worse - but I was wrong! Other songs included Satisfaction, Dancing Queen, Come Fly with Me, Yellow Submarine, Viva Las Vegas, a current Swedish pop song (that's really bad but really catchy), a couple of traditional Swedish songs, and a few others that I can't remember.

The dinner and singing were finished around 10-10:30ish. A good portion of the group stayed to continue the party. I left around 1am and there was still a group going strong (including a few who were limbo-ing). I didn't make it to work until around 10am the next day. However, people were still drifting in as late as 1pm - all in time for the Lucia celebration at 3pm, of course!

I apologize for the lack of pictures from the evening. I was too involved in the competitions to stand back and take pictures in the beginning. My camera also took a nasty fall at some point, relatively early on, in the night and ended up in a few pieces. (I was able to put it -mostly- back together the next day, though.)