Christmas with LIKE

For various reasons, I do not have a works Christmas Do this year but that is OK as the people I work with are (mostly) just people that I work with and there are other Christmas Dos to go to. Such as the one with LIKE.

The LIKE Christmas Party shows just what can be achieved if you get a few well-motivated and well-organised people together to do the planning and the on-the-day running around. It was a team effort but Nova Dobb led the way.

Much of the event was fairly standard, but still needed to be sorted. We held the party in the function room of the Rugby Tavern who did an excellent job in preparing the room and providing the food and drink.

A couple of little things made it a LIKE party.

Once we had all arrived and settled in with our glasses of bubbly we had a networking game to play.

Each person going had revealed something unusual about themselves, such as having a GCSE in Welsh, and everybody had a card with nine of these on and the aim was to mix and find the nine people on your card.

To add a little twist, I was given the scoring to do and was told I could award prizes on any basis that I liked; there was one main and five lesser prizes to distribute.

I was fair and reasonable  in my approach and awarded the main prize to the first completed card that I received that did not have as one of the answers the person with the card. Other prizes went to people who found more than one correct answer to some of the questions, getting them all right despite one of the answers not being in the room and for taking the networking more seriously than the game and so getting the lowest score.

We also had a Secret Santa with a difference - it had to cost no more that £1. That took several of us into pound shops for the first time. I went to Poundland in Cardiff and felt horribly out of place in a suit.

The presents were distributed simply by putting your present at a place setting on any table other than your own.

There were other traditional trappings of Christmas parties, such as hot mince pies and short speeches, that made it Christmassy but this was a LIKE Christmas and was all the more fun because of that.