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Tale of two Christmases: as UK firms cancel events, others want to party on

<span>Photograph: Business Images/Rex/Shutterstock</span>
Photograph: Business Images/Rex/Shutterstock

Omicron has led some businesses to call off events, but some fun-starved staff are determined to carry on regardless


Three months into her new job, Megan McCracken has never met most of the members of her team. So the office Christmas party was a big deal.

“We’re spread out all over the country,” said the 25-year-old, who lives in Sheffield. “It would have been so good to have the chance to actually see them in person. When the party was announced, it was put out there as this chance to spend time together.” The plan was a training awayday followed by dinner, a party and a night in a hotel. “It was a big deal because we’ve had such a terrible couple of years. It was light at the end of the tunnel.”

Then Omicron happened. McCracken’s company, an occupational health firm with a keen sense of the importance of practising what it preaches, cancelled. While understanding the decision, McCracken says her own friends are still keen to see each other.

“I think a lot of people would feel uncomfortable about a big thing now, but everyone is still very much up for meeting up in smaller groups,” she said. “Otherwise it’s like that light at the end of the tunnel has gone. And you have this feeling: are we in this for ever now?”

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Al, a 32-year-old advertising account manager in London, has also had her work Christmas do called off, but she isn’t particularly fussed. “I would say I actually like about one in three of my colleagues, I’m not that up for watching them get off with each other and vomit on themselves,” she said, hastily adding that she had probably better not use her last name.

“But seeing your mates is a different thing. Going out is the best bit of Christmas, isn’t it?” A university reunion, a pub crawl and two karaoke evenings are the tentpole events of her schedule, and she reckons she will be out four nights a week until Christmas Eve.

“I do feel a bit guilty about all of it, but until Boris Johnson literally says ‘do not leave your house’ I’m not going to cancel,” she said. “Sod that.”

In this, the season of pissed and mellow boozefulness, the heartsinking news of Omicron has led companies across the country to conclude they have no choice but to call things off.

NatWest, Deloitte, Aviva, University College London, Bandai, Age UK, NHS trusts and the BBC are among those to have gone beyond official guidance to cancel planned Christmas parties. A survey by the Covid-testing company Prenetics of 2,000 office workers concluded that about 52% of workplaces had decided not to hold the usual annual knees-up, and the online bookings platform Design My Night says cancellations went up by 14% after the government announced masks would be compulsory in shops in England last week.

At the same time, though, party-starved veterans of last year’s grim December appear largely determined to press on, on their own terms. It’s a tale of two Christmases, and nobody is quite sure what the ending will be.

Simon Potts, the managing director of The Alchemist, a cocktail bar and restaurant group with 18 sites across England and Wales, said his clientele – 22- to 34-year-olds – had been committed to going out since around July.

“We know people have been sat on cash, and there’s plenty of supporting data to suggest young people particularly are keen to live in the moment,” he said. While there had been “a little flurry of spooked corporate bookings where a CEO somewhere has pulled the plug,” for his company “I’m not sure there’s a shortfall at all … office workers are still going out, just in different guises.”

Chef Simon Wood at Wood restaurant in Manchester.
Chef Simon Wood at Wood restaurant in Manchester. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

For hospitality businesses with more corporate bookings, though, the impact is making itself felt. Simon Wood, the MasterChef winner who runs two restaurants, Wood Manchester and WoodKraft Cheltenham, said he was now “militant” about deposits and, at Wood Manchester, late cancellation penalties to deal with the problem.

Even so, a big corporate cancellation hurts. “I understand if a booking for six becomes a booking for four, we just have to roll with that,” Wood said. “But we lost a 40-person breakfast booking in Cheltenham because their office won’t let them socialise in a big group.”

“The biggest issue is no-shows,” said Michael Kill, the chief executive of the Night Time Industries Association. He blamed “confused” government messaging, which is hard to argue with: on the one hand Jenny Harries, the chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency, has suggested people shouldn’t socialise “when they don’t particularly need to”, and the science minister George Freeman has said his department would not be holding a large event; on the other, Sajid Javid and Boris Johnson have urged people to carry on as normal.

Reports of parties in Downing Street last December have done little to dampen a sense of confusion. And then there was Thérèse Coffey, the work and pensions secretary, giving a highly specific warning against snogging strangers, only for Downing Street to reiterate that people could get off with whoever they like.

The official position is that the “necessary and proportionate” return to compulsory face masks in shops and on public transport, as well as enhanced measures for international travellers, are all that is necessary for now. “The government doesn’t seem to understand that any representation of doubt just has a market reaction,” Kill said. “Nobody really knows what they’re supposed to do.”

To many events businesses that rely on a big December peak to get them through the quiet new year months, the message appears to be one of caution without compensation. “It needs to be what it needs to be,” said Ceri Steed, director (and, it should be noted, chief juggler) at Exitus Escape Rooms in Cardiff. “If we’re told that you have to close to protect the NHS, that’s fine. But at the moment it feels like they’re saying don’t come, but also we’re not going to support you.”

Steed is dying to make full use of her purpose-designed Christmas Chaos room – “the elves had a bit too much mulled wine at the Christmas party,” the Exitus website says, resulting in the loss of various presents, and it is the participants’ job to get them back under the tree – but has seen some cancellations from out-of-town visitors. “But we’re holding up with companies – our advantage is that the room isn’t shared with anyone outside of their group, so it’s different to a restaurant or a pub.”

In the face of so much uncertainty, even those who are determined to have a good time are also resigned to the prospect that they may soon not have a choice. “You hear so many conflicting things about Omicron,” Al said. “We were talking about it in the pub last night. And then I wondered if I should be there at all.” Did she leave? “I did,” she said. “But only after another two pints.”