Spain's company Christmas dinners: cost and attendance drop

Company dinner: free meal vs. €40 cost

The company Christmas dinner in Spain has stopped being a party and become a bill. And the company doesn't always pay. Some firms cover the meal—valued at over €50 in some cases—and still find staff who don't show up. In at least one case, an employee pays nearly €40 out of pocket to sit with people they didn't choose. The conclusion is repeated: the more mandatory the dinner seems, the less desire there is to attend.

Some even accumulate seven pre-Christmas lunches and dinners in a single season, including containment strategies: white wine, water at the peak moment, and no shots. The rest of success consists of enduring it.

How much does going to the company dinner really cost?

Going isn't always free, and that's the key that changes the equation. Where the company pays for menu and open bar, the cost shifts entirely to the next day. Where it doesn't pay, the joke rounds to €40 per head according to a forum user's account, a figure that weighs more if the trinc month comes loaded with expenses.

The domestic alternative—eating what you feel like, putting on a movie, and answering to no one—is chosen by several participants in the thread.

There is an asymmetry that explains half the anger: the same act that some finance from their own pockets, others have covered with menus exceeding €50 and open bar. When the benefit is identical but the cost isn't, the conversation becomes poisoned.

The lightning strategy: croquettes, two beers, and smoke bomb

The veteran attendee's manual fits in four steps. Show up at 10:00 if the format is standing with catering. Eat croquettes, prawns, and ham while chatting about football with the boss and whoever you like, which are always few. Drink from the open bar without overdoing it. And at 23:30 or 00:00, when most are already on their third drink, disappear without saying goodbye.

It is a calculated choreography: look good, eat for free, and laugh a bit at the spectacle. Some describe it as watching a documentary about humans climbing. A finer variant consists of withdrawing separately, in small groups, so the void isn't noticed, and continuing the night of drinks with the select group, the one that actually meets the rest of the year.

At the opposite extreme is total abstention. Fifteen years without attending an after-work event and four or five without going to a family dinner. When the call is organized by the company, invented excuse; when organized by colleagues, silence and not going. No dramas.

Does the dinner help network with the boss?

That's the official argument of all time: the dinner is networking disguised as celebration. The counterargument is devastating and increasingly popular. It summarizes that you go to work to work, not to fight or make friends, and that when the bell rings there is nothing else to talk about with colleagues, no dinners, no beers, nothing.

Between those two poles appears an intermediate nuance. Forcing together people who don't meet voluntarily the rest of the year is an exercise in hypocrisy, some argue. But that shouldn't drag down those who simply want to hang out with theirs. The problem isn't the dinner, it's the imposition. Hence many defend that the solution is for each person to go if they feel like it, and not be criticized if they don't.

At that point, a participant summarizes an exit: civil servants have it solved. They don't go, don't give explanations, and nobody cares. Permanent position as maximum expression of social freedom.

The risk peine at the table

Firings cited by some participants also appear in the thread, unrelated to the dinner itself: in one company, five people a month before; in another, someone claims around 10% of staff were laid off after closing the fiscal year. And there are accounts of a party that ended with a young employee drinking too much and falling down the hotel stairs where the event was held.

To this is added the classic midnight mess, of which versions of all kinds circulate and none verifiable, and the suspicion, held by some participants, that the dinner serves for people to let slip confidences past the third drink.

Who stays home and with whom

Abstention has profiles. There are those who have broken with everything related to Christmas and consider those days normal dates, especially since grandparents are gone. There are those who stayed home on New Year's Eve and describe the discovery as wonderful: dinner, movie, and sleep. And there are those who take advantage of any meeting to skip out with health excuses, still valid in some conversations.

What repeats in the thread is that the company dinner is lived as an endurance test. He who goes wants to leave. He who doesn't go no longer justifies himself. Although tradition has a resilience capacity worth not underestimating.