Do people really do dumb things at holiday parties anymore?
Ah, the holiday party. So fun. So festive. So fraught with peril.
Or is it?
I’m beginning to think the whole holiday party faux pas thing is an urban legend. Take the results of a recent survey by The Creative Group. In it, they asked 250 U.S. advertising and marketing executives to describe the most off-the-wall employee behavior they’d heard of at a company event.
Note the language: that they’d “heard of.”
Right there, that tells me the responses they got must have been the most blown out of proportion stories that probably got wilder with each re-telling over the water cooler.
Remember the old game of “telephone”? Where you give one person a sentence, and they have to repeat it to the next person, who has to repeat it to the next person, and by the time it goes through 10 or 12 people, the sentence turns into something entirely different?
You can imagine how The Creative Group came to get responses such as these:
“The president of our company came dressed up as a chicken.”
“One guy ate the carnations from our dinner table.”
“One colleague set another’s wig on fire while it was on her head.”
And they did ask advertising and marketing folks, people. Embellishment, puffery, and creative storytelling are par for the course in their world. 
All that said, on the off chance you or a colleague could use the advice, I’ll share their top eight holiday party etiquette tips here, but you’ll have to check out their press release for the full explanations (and a few more funny lines):
1. R.S.V.P. promptly.
2. Dress the part.
3. Mix it up.
4. Don’t monopolize anyone’s time.
5. Eat a bite beforehand.
6. Limit libations.
7. Help your guests be gracious.
8. End on a high note.
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[...] And unlike the “craziest story you ever heard of” holiday party story I flagged in the last blog post, these stories either come from journalistic sources, from consultants who were there when it happened, to managers and executives who went through it and lived to tell about it. [...]