Part of the yearly ritual at work revolved around finding ways to celebrate the holidays that didn’t run afoul of the almighty PC Brigade. In the distant past, remembered only by a select few, there’d been an office Christmas party. That met its end for obvious reasons, even though Carl Lowenstein had long participated in its planning, even good-naturedly supplying his wife’s latkes to the potluck.

Next was the Christmahanukwanzaakah party, which was functionally similar but replaced the Christmas decorations with a melange of colorful symbols both old and post-1966. After Abdus Rahman joined the company, all religious trappings were stripped from the event, allegedly because the PC Brigate couldn’t locate any reasonably-priced Bangladeshi religious symbols. Abdus was happy to go along with a party as long as there was food, but he did get a bit testy when he learned that the proposed decorations to convert Christmahanukwanzaakah to Ramachristmahanukwanzaakahdon were manufactured in Pakistan.

Narinder Singh was the next wrinkle. He participated in the rechristened Holiday Party with gusto, but it same to the attention of the PC Brigade that he wasn’t throwing a holiday of his own under the banner–no Sikh holiday fell within December for that matter. So having any sort of December celebration was therefore taboo. It got to the point that we had a diffuse Autumn Celebration, with volunteers bringing dishes to pass every other weekend from September 21 thru December 31.

And that was how the office wound up stinking of Jeehun Choi’s kimchi around Halloween.