Why can’t adults have end of term games too?

With office Christmas parties being cancelled at every turn, Will Gore looks enviously at his children’s pre-holiday fun

Will considers putting on a nativity production, in place of a cancelled office Christmas party (Getty/iStock)

Every year at this time of year, I hope beyond hope that I’ll turn up at the office to discover that we’re just going to spend the day doing Christmassy crafts or playing board games. Oddly, it hasn’t happened yet.

Those wonderful days at the end of the autumn term, where there was a sense of both gearing up for Christmas and winding down from real work, remain strong in the memory. And judging by my children’s experience, little has changed in the last three decades.

The perennial debate we had as kids was whether the dog days of the autumn term were better than those of the summer term. Plainly the advantages of the latter were that we had the prospect of a full six weeks of holiday ahead, and that some of the activities at school could be done outdoors. At junior school we seemed to spend hour upon hour playing rounders.