The Fuzzy Gerdes Holiday Office Party Method has served me well for the last couple of years, so I thought I'd share:

• Visit the buffet and eat some good food Have a drink
• Chat with your various inter-departmental friends that maybe you don't see all that often
• Have a few more drinks a little too quickly
• Return to your desk and finish your online Christmas shopping
• Go back out to the atrium and grab another drink
• Come back to your desk and make some intemperate online shopping decision Go back to the atrium and see who's left to catch an early train to the suburbs and who are die-hard partiers. Grab another drink.
• Come back to your desk and make a blog post, relying on MarEdit's spell-checker to catch your worst typos. Grammar is your own problem.