Good morning everyone and welcome back to the Breakroom! Now I did not have time this week for a Coffee Break, as you may have noticed, because besides being busy with work we did have a sick pup in the house. Our Loki threw up several times on Monday (starting at 1am) so he has been our priority this week. He is doing much better, still on some rice and beef and some anti-nausea medication but it’s looking like it was just a stomach bug so I will be back with a Coffee Break this next week. As always, if there are specific topics you’d like me to cover then feel free to head over to the Contact page to get in touch directly, or you can leave a comment on one of my posts! Additionally, I hope you will consider subscribing so I can make sure you stay up-to-date with anything new here at Breakroom Breakdown. With that, let us get into today’s Breakdown and I hope you are ready for a bit of Christmas in June!
It was our office’s Christmas party and the day started off with a miracle from above, or across the road. On his way in to work today, Dwight ran over a goose and had the foresight to get out and grab the goose to bring in to prepare for dinner for everyone! The Schrutes do not like to let anything go to waste, the goose alone will provide a delicious meal, feathers, and goose grease. While some of us were okay with looking forward to a tasty Christmas goose, Toby was indignant that he can not butcher and clean a goose in the office. True to form, Dwight had attempted to do this very thing when he brought in a live duck awhile back. Ultimately, we wear Toby down and he is okay with Dwight preparing the goose as long as he cleans it in his car. Unfortunately, he throws the dead goose in the fridge and we never actually get to partake in it as dinner. I considered doing goose for Christmas a few years ago rather than the traditional turkey, but my word gooses get expensive! Does anyone lean more towards goose than turkey for their Christmas meal?
Besides the loss of a tasty meal, we are all trying to celebrate the season of giving this year with a big toy drive to donate to local group. Michael is so giving he brings in a full bicycle (that looked suspiciously like his old bike). My company does a big toy/gift drive every Christmas and it really is a great idea for your office. If your company doesn’t already do one, consider looking into a local group or even one of the larger organizations (like Toys for Tots) so you can promote thinking about others for the season. It can be a lot of fun shopping for different toys, clothes, and even art supplies to donate to those in need and it really offers you the chance to do something special.
Between the Christmas party and toy drive, Michael was truly walking on cloud 9 that when his girlfriend, Carol, showed up to the office he swept her into his office. She left shortly later and it turns out that Michael’s plans have gone out the window. I guess he took a photo of Carol with her kids and ex-husband, photoshopped himself over her ex and then sent it out to people for his holiday card. He then sprung on her that he had gotten tickets to Sandals Resort in Jamaica for over the holidays. As sweet as that is, I’m pretty sure it is not okay to surprise your casual girlfriend who has two kids with such a trip. Needless to say, Carol decided that these were the last straws and broke up with him. As can be expected, Michael began to spiral to the point he wanted to just cancel Christmas altogether. I was really worried that he would spiral to the point that the office would come to a standstill, sort of like this normally works out. Thankfully, Andy decided it was his job to cheer him up so he was able corral him out the door and spend lunch over at Benihana’s (known to Michael as “Asian Hooters”) and Michael decides to bring Jim and Dwight along with them. Ryan was invited too but was prepared with a thousand different excuses. Major props to Ryan, I don’t know how many people feel the need to have an excuse not to do something in their back pocket but preparing such reasons is not a terrible idea. Considering Michael has a habit of asking him to do a lot of things outside his job description, I think that is why it is so crucial for him.
While this is all going on, there is a major battle of the Christmas parties going on in the office today. It started when Karen decided to join the Party Planning Committee (still headed up by Angela) in an attempt incorporate some ideas that Stamford would to help them feel welcome (even though we are down to only three employees from Stamford). She suggests a Christmas raffle, karaoke, and a drinking game. Angela shoots them all down since they are not on theme with her nutcracker theme and kicks her out of the Committee. Trying to extend an olive branch, Pam reaches out afterwards and the two of them end up deciding to throw their own party in competition against Angela. No one goes up against Angela, especially when it is regarding her position as head of the Party Planning Committee. They decide to schedule their Margarita-Karaoke Christmas Party fifteen minutes before hers in a clear attempt to take over the office. Angela truly goes out of her way to get their party canceled, including trying to get Dwight and Toby to interfere but nothing works. In the end, both parties go off with out a hitch and despite Angela’s having all of the baked goods, the majority all go to the Margarita-Karaoke Party except for Phyllis, Kevin, and Hannah. Eventually the group at Benihana return and Michael and Andy are excited to introduce us to their new girlfriends they met at the restaurant!
Well, the party gets a bit weird at this point. It almost feels like Michael can’t even tell which one is which and he then tries talk her into going to Sandals with him as well and this proceeds to fall apart as well. On the brightside, having proved their point with hosting the most popular party, Karen and Pam reach out to Angela and suggest they combine the parties and Angela actually agrees. More than that, she even decides to perform her rendition of Little Drummer Boy with the karaoke machine. In the end, this ended up being a pretty good Christmas party, and Michael actually did a lot less damage than with his Yankee Swap debacle so win-win!
With this entire party situation, I do have to call out that this does sort of showcase the different types of people there are who throw parties. Pam and Karen are the type whose party can typically be thrown together in a couple of hours, and their main goal is to come up with fun ideas and throw them in the mix and that becomes their party. In this case, they went with margaritas and karaoke. Then there are those who are like Angela, who typically will spend weeks planning their party with every detail accounted for, and will often have some sort of theme to tie it all together. Additionally, because they often have the entire thing planned already they are not very accepting of others trying to come in at the last moment with “why don’t you do this too?” With that, I will admit I much more an Angela sort of person. If I only have 24-hours to put together an event I certainly can, but for anything arranged in advance I will plan out the menu, activities, and try to put together some sort of theme to it all. The big difference is while Angela keeps the Committee in place to have people under her to do the heavy lifting, I am normally the one who would prefer to do everything. No offense but when it comes to parties and events, I lean towards that only I can do it just the right way so it’s just easier if I take care of it all. I get that it can be fun and perhaps easy to just wing it, but a big party of my planning is I hate to have something unaccounted for. For example, I like to know ahead of time if there is any chance we will have guests with specific dietary requirements so I can either remove it entirely from the menu, or simply ensure there is a nice variety to pick from. My husband cannot eat gluten, for instance, and I can assure you that we have gone to parties where they forgot about this fact. Thank goodness for vegetable trays or he’d pry starve at those parties, but that is why it is so crucial to plan for any such instance.
Planning a Menu
With that, let me give some tips if this if you are tasked with arranging the food for a small party, and I will use a personal example to help. I was asked by a friend to be married if I would do the food for their bride/groom party (instead of a bridal shower they are throwing it for the couple together).
- Who is the party for? This really can impact the menu because you want to design the menu differently if it is an event in honor of one person versus a variety of individuals. In this case it is a party in honor of the bridge and groom, so I want to ensure that they enjoy all of the foods and know of any dietary restraints. The bridge cannot consume gluten so my first goal is absolutely no gluten anywhere on the menu. Since the party is for the bride and groom, they should be entitled to be able to eat anything they want without worry of if they can. Likewise if she was a vegetarian, I would say no meat should be at the party. If the party is thrown in honor of a person, it is their personal diet which should dictate the menu.
- How many people? You want to ensure you not only have enough food for everyone, but if you are preparing the food yourself you want to have any idea of how much food to prepare since that will dictate how much time you need. Right now it sounds like around 30 people. While not an overwhelming amount of people, this is doable because I know the party is happening early afternoon on a Sunday so I have already decided I would do shopping for it Friday or Saturday and then do any cooking/baking that can be done in advance on Saturday so I am not scrambling.
- How is the food set up? This might be an odd question but basically, how do people get their food? In this case it will arranged at a table for people to grab a plate and pull from the options. I have already been told that the venue, while able to hold a lot of people can start to get tight if people group up so this did impact my food options. My personal annoyance is when people take too long to get food, think of that one person is holds up a line in putting together their plate but they get stuck in a conversation. To mitigate this risk, I wanted everything to be grabbable without anything that they need to put together themselves and could congest the venue.
- Menu with variety. Finally, we need a menu that offers some variety so it isn’t all the same flavors. Since this party is around 1pm, I wanted to have a feel of a light lunch since people are most likely not eating beforehand. So this tells me I want to have mostly savory foods, but some sweets because people will want a bit of dessert. This is a celebratory event and people do love to indulge when they are in a festive mood.
- Putting together the menu. This will usually narrow down your ideas and then it is about finding options in your personal cookbooks or looking online. Taking all of these details I ultimately settled on platters of sandwiches for people to draw from. I do a great dill chicken salad and then a cucumber and cream cheese, just in case there are people who might be vegetarian. For sweets I settled on cupcakes because those do not get messy to eat, I can make multiple batches in advance, and they are easy to transport. I’m looking at summer flavors but leaning towards s’mores, a strawberry shortcake, and then perhaps something with citrus. Finally, we will round it out with fruit and vegetable trays and perhaps even some meats and cheeses.
- Final touches. Any final touches of the menu would normally fall under your beverages (unless you were doing a custom cocktail you most likely didn’t think of this yet) and then you cannot forget the plates, napkins, and cutlery. In this case, someone else is taking care of all of this so I do not need to worry!
And that, is how I came up with the menu for this event. As you can see, I do take quite a bit of time in creating a menu and I take a lot under consideration. There are those out there who probably would have just waited until the day before and headed up to Sam’s Club and the menu would be what they could find there. Not to say there is anything wrong with that, but I can assure you that unlike many parties I have gone to I always ensure that I have thought of any sort of dietary restriction if it was possible to be known about. Now if someone shows up and only recently decided to become a vegan, unfortunately I couldn’t have known about that otherwise I would have taken that into consideration because I did inquire for any such cases in advance. So what type of party planner are you all? Are you an Angela who needs to carefully plan every last detail and is not a big fan of others’ input, or are you a Pam and Karen who are of the “more the merrier” mentality when it comes to party ideas?
And with that, I hope I was able to help distract you this Friday just enough to help make the weekend seem just bit closer. It is also officially summer so here is hoping the sun comes out and we can get outside to enjoy the new season (unfortunately I think we are in for rain). As head of my own personal Party Planning Committee, I am always eager to share some ideas so please review below for various PPC-themed items that I have found (which I may or may not have purchased myself) plus some fun tools for your next party. Until next time, I’ll see you around the Breakroom.
Party Planning Committee-themed Merchandise
Official PPC Book https://amzn.to/4bf9z5Z
Coffee Mug https://amzn.to/3VTYdzT
T-Shirt https://amzn.to/3zdsYqB
Cute T-Shirt https://amzn.to/45GAhmQ
Hoodie https://amzn.to/3KStpJj
Pillow https://amzn.to/4b7CEQA
Party Supplies https://amzn.to/3Xz47rg
Dundie Award https://amzn.to/3VRvpI3
2 thoughts on “The Office: Season 3, Episode 10/11 “A Benihana Christmas””