I don't know about you, but I’ve never actually seen anyone wearing a lampshade. Or having an assignation in a coat closet. Or going into full-on truth mode an inch from the face of the personnel director, or the vice president of sales, or the C.E.O.  What this tells me is that I have probably attended office Christmas parties in the wrong era.

Cubicle dwellers in decades past had a lot of fun. Or at least that’s the impression you get from photographs. Pictures from the 1940s are often poignant in their apparent innocence. People wear party hats and unforced smiles; the mood is more affectionate than raucous. Doris from accounting dances with Roger from marketing, and nobody even considers casting aspersions. The yuksters from the seventh floor put on a skit; somebody gets up and makes a speech. Then Santa leads a conga line between the rows of filing cabinets. It all makes you almost want to cry. Photographs from the ’60s, on the other hand, tend to depict wised-up adults letting their hair down, drinking like sailors, smoking like tailpipes, doing the hully-gully, and getting way personal. Between the Cuban missile crisis and the Summer of Love lay a time when it seemed the world was changing all at once, and for the better.

If since then the world has not always changed in desirable ways, then neither has the office party, rising and falling and rising again with the vagaries of the economic landscape, not to mention the ever-increasing fear of litigation. A casual survey of the available literature on the subject, which is scant and consists mostly of newspaper clippings, reveals sharp changes in office parties, much bemoaned, between eras. One year, the company is hosting 300 at the museum’s Hall of Mammals, with oysters and champagne and sides of beef and strolling minstrels and goody bags; the next, the holiday party is held in the lunchroom at quitting time, with celery and olives, diet soda, and a recording of the Harry Simeone Chorale.

While we will have forgotten the lunchroom party by the following afternoon, the celebrations that live on in memory tend to be rife with the exact sorts of things that management wishes to discourage. But who’s to say that such mischief doesn’t boost productivity? If financial security seems to encourage behavioral abandon, might it not be the case that the logic can be reversed? That hard partying can lead to bigger profits? Just asking.