It seems that the older I get, the more Christmas parties I get dragged to.

In high school/college we were more about the New Year's Eve party (everyone crash at one person's house in a big drunken slumber party, drinking the wine and champagne parents had tacitly set aside for us by placing them in the fridge label side out). Now it's all about the Christmas party. Really. New Year's is no biggie anymore. Not even y2k. Let's see. Out of the past five years...

New Year's Eve 1996: Drunken free-wheeling bar crawl through several of Dallas' finer establishments.

New Year's Eve 1997: Drunken hijinks with soon-to-be fiance at a really boring-ass party.

New Year's Eve 1998: Spent in a car, driving from New Orleans to Dallas to try to catch the tail end of a party. Everyone was inanely drunk by the time we got there. Mr rampy got a hideous migrane from driving for so long.

New Year's Eve 1999: Spent at home with mr rampy, too afraid to go out in case there was y2k rioting. Watched ABC coverage of different time change celebrations.

New Year's Eve 2000: On a plane. No champagne or any other festivities. They popped a champagne cork over the intercom at midnight so we could all hear it and feel vicariously partyish.

I sense a downward trend here. :)

On the plus side, the Christmas parties have definitely improved in quality. Instead of going to department parties with professors who envy me the mustard corduroy jacket I swiped from my dad for kicks (actually, I envy me too. It was a sad day when he took that back) or freakishly self-involved and egomaniacal classmates who believe none of our Christmases will be complete until we hear them soulfully belting Christmas carols, accompanied only by a Casio keyboard set to Bossa Nova beat, now I go to office parties.

It's a step up, I think. Last year I was typhoid rampy at mr rampy's party. Laryngitis up to here, coughing blood, with no voice and a raging fever, and yet I still had a fairly good time. Excellent food (it was at a posh steakhouse, after all) and only the best of wines. The downside was mr rampy telling everyone I couldn't speak (implying that I was a deaf mute, rather than just cloaked in a miasma of germs), but even that is funny in retrospect.

Of course, I was so delirious with fever that I don't remember anyone I met last year. Which made tonight interesting. "OH YES! HI!!! GOOD TO SEE YOU AGAIN!"

Cliffnotes or some sort of name tags would have been nice.