A corporate Christmas carol

In the Philippines corporate world, December is practically a mere half month as the Yuletide season goes into full gear and the season’s default operations overwhelm and oftentimes overtake the day-to-day commercial operations of many companies relative to other times of the year.

Save for the accounting department toiling through the wee hours to close the fiscal year’s books, putting in a month’s work is nearly impossible.

The secretarial pool and the administrative departments gradually build up to a hectic frenzy as they kick off the holidays by digging through old closets for plastic wreaths, plastic multi-colored balls, the old plastic Christmas tree and other paper and plastic decorations set aside for a genuine non-plastic celebration.

Activity ratchets up and panic sets in as the middle of December comes along.

There’s the Christmas Party to schedule and arrange.

Raffle prizes have to be decided upon, canvassed and then bought or solicited. These range from gift checks to the undying six-piece water tumbler set, the undying portable water heater, to the undying desk fan and the default grand prize, the medium-sized refrigerator.

Whatever permutations and combinations change over the years, there will always be the basket of groceries wrapped in cellophane and comprised of a bag of pasta, a ball of cheddar cheese, a large bar of Toblerone, a can of beans, a tin of coffee and biscuits, a cardboard tube of Pringles, and finally, a pound and a half of useless shredded paper.

For those deciding these prizes, it isn’t really important what they are as much as the imposing size of the package and the boxes they come in as well as their relative value among others once displayed in a prominent area in the middle of the company canteen.

Christmas can also be contentious.

There are the various party themes debated on and viciously fought over. The de­bates can turn un-Christian as some include the conten­tiously passionate issues of venues and programs, includ­ing departmental raffles and fiercely cutthroat-competi­tive vaudeville presentations. Like fights to the death, these competitive and themed pre­sentations are taken seriously.

There are casting calls, auditions, full-dress rehears­als and choir practices. There is the default Kris Kringle ex­change gift protocol. There are the mid-day and lunch-break conferences to discuss critical inter-departmental corporate matters such as the minimum allowable gift val­ue, even the seemingly ran­dom assignment and eventual distribution of secret identi­ties and aliases.

Among the numerous pa­pers, documents and vouch­ers that need to be signed by the Board of Directors, man­agement and the executive staff are the un-ending stream of Christmas cards and give away tags pre-labeled for the thousands of anonymous cli­ents, colleagues, government factotum and others. Full sig­natures carefully written to be readable quickly turn into single-stroke chicken scratch initials save for those deliber­ately personalized and meant for real acquaintances, friends and politicians.

No one really cares about the addressees save for the few that are individually fa­miliar or those meant for regulators, politicians or the taxman. For those especial­ly chosen to sign these, the most important is to find an empty space within the card to scribble in one’s signature where it might have some prominence so that the card becomes more personal and not one among thousands in an assembly line.

Messengers and drivers are the busiest. They roam the ever-gridlocked metropo­lis going from office to office delivering gifts and giveaways. As the travel time along Edsa alone is the equivalent of fly­ing from Manila to any city in Mindanao, the hopes of de­livering corporate gifts before the Christmas weekend dim.

The foregoing reflect internal, albeit paradoxi­cal, merriment relative to the drudgery we go through stretched over 11 months of the year. Corporate Christ­mas gifts and giveaways, on the other hand, convey to the external marketplace corpo­rate attitudes.

Fortunately, Christmas is not the right time to look gift horses in the mouth, lest we realize as recipients our relative insignificance in the corporate world. After all, the bureaucratic processes to determine who gets what in­volves less of a Christmassy spirit than it does of hierar­chical utilitarianism dwelling more on commercialism than Advent’s deeply spiritual giv­ing and sharing.

Vice presidents up to counterpart CEOs get the bottle of wine, the Samsonite satchel or the pewter chess set. The least they would get are food baskets with a bottle of a Napa Valley wine or Ken­tucky brew. Below those lev­els, the objective of Yuletide giving is retail advertising. The gifts are the umbrellas, rolled wall calendars or the memo cubes prominently branded with corporate logos.

Dickens got it right with his characterization of Ebenezer Scrooge as a mer­chant. Fortunately, as in Dick­ens’s tale, at home far from the office, in the final seconds of Christmas Eve everything changes as we embrace our loved ones and realize what Advent is truly about.