CoffeeTime Science: Lab Christmas

Bringing the holiday spirit to the lab

It’s December, and I’m back in the UK. Christmas party season. After six years in the US, I’d almost forgotten the general debauchery that is the pre-Christmas season in London. I’m skyping with Katja and Narges over coffee, and we’re discussing our different experiences with this particular season.

“In my PhD lab, festivities would begin with the British Society for Immunology congress in early December, and from then on, it was one Christmas lunch or party after another. There was the institute party, the division lunch, the lab lunch or dinner (sometimes both), other labs’ dinners, which we’d join after the food for the drinking… Basically, science ground to a halt in December and didn’t happen again until January,” I reminisce. “It sounds rather excessive (and admittedly it was), but I think it was also nice to relax a little with your colleagues and forget about the stress of science and funding for a while before getting back to business as usual in the new year”. Narges nods and adds

“And the fact that most labs closed between Christmas and New Year meant everyone got a good amount of time to spend time with their friends or family, whether they celebrated Christmas or not”.

“It’s amazing how different things are here in the US” Katja comments, “which is exemplified by the fact that our departmental holiday party is always in January”. Oh, yes, I’d forgotten about that. “We didn’t really have any departmental holiday parties at my previous lab either” I remember. “Our PI would always invite the lab to his Hanukah party, and the division chief always had a pot-luck at his house, but compared to London, all of that was very tame”.

My colleague Christy and I also played lots of Christmas music in the lab and used to decorate the lab with fairy lights every December to create some pre-Christmas spirit, to which the building maintenance guys thankfully turned a festive blind eye. “It’s actually amazing how non-festive December could feel in our institute” Narges observes. “The only hint of the upcoming holidays was that most Europeans disappeared in the week before Christmas and that nobody was around to take on alarm duty”.

Meanwhile, my new colleagues and I have been enjoying this year’s British Medical Journal Christmas issue on the epidemiology and control of zombie infections. “It’s an amazing article, actually” I add, “They obviously did a lot of research”. The BMJ Christmas edition is a well-loved classic amongst scientist in the UK, and one of my other recent favourites was an investigation into James Bond’s alcohol consumption two years ago. This tongue-in-cheek attitude towards science and the willingness of a serious scientific journal to poke fun at themselves and scientists in general as part of a little comic relief before Christmas is exactly what we should be doing at this time of year, before things get serious again in the New Year. Merry Christmas!

My name is Christine, and I am an immunologist. After my undergraduate studies in Oxford, I moved to London for my PhD and first postdoc. After 7 years in this magnificent city, I was ready for an adventure and decided to go to Boston for a second postdoc. Six years later, I’ve made Boston my permanent home, but I am currently on an 8-month sabbatical back in London, where I am learning new things at The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine before returning to Boston. In addition to doing research, I write a series of blogs about conversations and discussions I have had with other scientists, with topics ranging from the inane to career goals and options, our research, new techniques and technologies and the like. I would like to share some of those topics with you in this blog. Want to join in? Grab yourself a cup of your favorite caffeinated beverage, read along, and leave comments. You can read my other blog posts here.