We went to a second Swiss Christmas party last week, thrown by my husband’s company. The owner of this company loves to force his employees to endure spring surprises on his employees, even though the Swiss ones (ie, everyone except my husband) seem to not be too fond of being surprised.
I, on the other hand, think these surprise adventures are great, and I enthusiastically attended this one despite the fact that I was feeling quite under the weather (ie, too sick to safely leave the house).
The Christmas party adventure started with a train ride out of the city to a semi-remote location up on a ridge. I’m sure there would have been a beautiful view had we actually been able to see anything (which we couldn’t, because it was night). When we got off the train we were handed torches, and then headed off uphill through a nice subdivision and then the woods, on a half-hour hike. This hike would have been a lot more fun if there had been, say, snow on the ground, but with the cold drizzle it was a little less than ideal.
When we arrived at our destination, we exchanged our torches for hot mugs of Glühwein and watched a tongue-in-cheek instructional video about the adventure that was before us: we were going to form groups around some sort of heat source, stick out our right hands and move them in circles, and feel an inner warmth.
But first, bowling! OK, actually it was Kegeln, a German version of bowling with 9 pins in a diamond shape and strange scoring rules. There were two lanes in the basement of the restaurant. After about 20 minutes of this, it was upstairs to the dining room, where another instructional video informed the two people who hadn’t yet figured it out that the activity at hand was fondue-eating. It was good, too.
The after-dinner entertainment was a montage video of past mystery trips and company Christmas parties. It included footage from our great Jungfrau adventure from the summer, but the vast majority of the video was of last year’s Christmas party, where employees had performed Beatles songs with delightfully amusing Swiss-German lyrics about things only they understood. At this point I turned to the person next to me and asked whether next year’s Christmas party would feature video of us watching video of last year’s Christmas party. He didn’t seem to understand me.
OK, so for a mystery event, this outing was somewhat sub-par. I’m looking forward to the next one to make up for this one’s shortfalls. I’m still hoping we’ll visit the monks at their pagoda…
Wow! Spouses are actually allowed to attend your husband’s company’s Christmas party? That’s not the case at Mrs. TBF’s company; not that I’d really want to attend – I’d just like to be invited.