Once upon a time, corporate bosses, associates, and interns alike would set aside their different titles and gather each December for drinks, dancing, and conversation. There would be gourmet dinners, chocolate fountains, DJs, and even live bands. For some, it was a night of merriment and splendor; for others, of awkward small talk, followed by deep regret.

Then the holiday party became endangered. In the wake of #MeToo in 2017, more professionals began rethinking the wisdom of a boozed-up night with their colleagues. The pandemic and remote work delivered a near death blow. In a 2020 survey of about 200 HR representatives by the executive-outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a mere 23% said they opted for seasonal celebrations, nearly three-quarters of which would be held virtually.

But as the return to offices continues, companies are slowly reinstituting holiday parties. Last year, nearly 65% of companies surveyed by Challenger, Gray, & Christmas said they planned to host in-person holiday parties, within sight of the 80% reported in 2016, before the advent of #MeToo. If plans pan out, this year could have before-times levels of corporate holiday cheer.

The return of the office holiday party could be a happier development than many jaded workers are likely inclined to presume. With two-thirds of the American white-collar workforce working remotely either some or all of the time, according to a USA Today survey conducted earlier this year, face time with colleagues and superiors is no longer a default feature of the 9-to-5. That might not be a big deal for everyone, but early-career workers stand to pay the steepest professional price for missing out on the kinds of networking and mentorship opportunities that are likelier to happen organically in a shared physical space. All the while, workers across the board are feeling increasingly lonely, overextended, and disengaged. They need something — anything — to celebrate.

In a work environment punctuated by uncertainty and isolation, it might be premature to let one's inner Scrooge have the final word on the tradition.

From Fezziwig's ball in "A Christmas Carol" to the power-suited backdrop of the 1988 Christmas Eve action thriller "Die Hard," the workplace holiday party has been a fixture of the cultural imagination for generations. But in the mid-20th century, the event garnered its enduring reputation for sloppiness and day-after regret. A 1948 Life magazine photo spread from a Christmas party thrown in the office of a Manhattan insurance brokerage depicts, among other modern-day HR violations, a pantless male executive dancing arm in arm with a young female stenographer and a pair of colleagues leaning in for a smooch beneath a bundle of mistletoe.

Somewhere along the way, festivities evolved from low-key gatherings held at the office to lavish affairs that might include gourmet meals, hired entertainment, and even international travel and accommodation on the boss' dime. The pandemic notwithstanding, the economic pendulum has largely dictated its tilt toward excess or restraint.

As a Toronto-area DJ during the halcyon days of the late-'90s dot-com bubble, Baruch Labunski had a front-row seat to corporate-party splendor. "I went to many and saw a lot of crazy things," he said. He described being flown to DJ holiday parties in far-flung global destinations such as Bora Bora, Palawan, and Ibiza — and, on top of that, getting paid $50,000 to $100,000 per event. (When I asked how many holiday parties he booked in a typical season, he said only "many.") By the time the dot-com bubble burst and the demand for his services cooled, Labunski had tired himself out of the DJ booth and pivoted to a career in marketing.

Economic recovery in the mid-2000s spurred a holiday-party renaissance, only to be dashed once again in the 2008 recession. A few years later, Wall Street firms were reportedly back to enjoying hush-hush holiday festivities reminiscent of their heydays. The free-money firehose of the ZIRP era was in full force, and excess was back in style.

Danielle Kane, who was a reporter for a niche New York City financial-services publication between 2015 and 2017, said that one year her company flew the entire staff of 50 to 75 people to Berlin. "Hotels and flights were paid for, there was an experiential dinner at the Berlin TV Tower, and then they paid for everyone to get into a fancy club afterwards," she said. "It was a late night, and I've never experienced a company holiday party like it since."

For all their fun, these often cringe-inducing affairs earned a bad rap — one that may come to bite younger workers.

Despite some companies' largesse, the general workforce's enthusiasm for holiday parties has long been mixed. In a 2017 survey of American workers by Randstad, 90% of respondents said they'd rather receive bonuses or extra vacation days than attend a company holiday party. "The ideal situation," Constance Noonan Hadley, an organizational psychologist, told me, "is to offer activities that foster employee social health (such as a holiday party) without asking them to sacrifice their financial health (such as a bonus) or their mental health (such as time off)."

Companies squander the opportunity to make holiday gatherings meaningful in all sorts of small but critical ways. Hadley said the Christmas-specific focus of many company holiday parties could be alienating to workers who follow non-Christian religious traditions. Parties are often held at inconvenient times and places — too late on a weeknight for parents, in a location that has expensive parking or is hard to access. Holiday parties at big firms can also be loud, hot, and crowded, which makes it difficult to have meaningful conversations or meet new people.

Well-planned company holiday parties, on the other hand, can be a boon to employees' overall work experience and even strengthen company culture. A study of workers at several German companies in 2019 concluded that parties could encourage social bonding, especially when employees' feedback steered the planning. The study suggests, for example, that icebreaker activities that get people from different parts of the organization talking help build camaraderie, despite the eye rolls they may initially provoke. Over time, that can contribute to a happier and more cohesive work environment.

For early-career workers, the benefits can be more pronounced. Rick Hermanns, the president and CEO of HireQuest, a global staffing company, said social events could help make up for the "intangible aspects of career growth and camaraderie between colleagues" that younger workers may miss out on when they're partly or fully remote. In a 2023 Adobe poll of more than 1,000 Gen Z workers at midsize and large US companies, 83% of respondents said a workplace mentor was crucial for their career, but only 52% said they had one. While holiday parties aren't the be-all and end-all of workplace networking, they provide a critical opening to build and fortify connections.

"When I look back at my early career in banking in Los Angeles, I appreciated the time I had to walk into a senior executive's office or grab a beer after work with colleagues," Hermanns said. "Those are the intangibles you can't quantify yet ultimately impact your career growth." Simply put, face time matters.

It makes sense that Gen Z and millennial workers would be more enthusiastic about workplace holiday get-togethers than their Gen X and baby-boomer counterparts. "Company leaders need to help Gen Z — as well as millennials, whose workplace experience was hugely disrupted by COVID — to build strong interpersonal workplace relationships," Hubert Palan, the CEO of the product-management company Productboard, told Business Insider last year.

Given that much of the global workforce feels lonely on the job, it's not just the youngest workers who need a social boost. A new study Hadley coauthored evaluating workplace loneliness and remedies found that the loneliest people at work were those who were offered the fewest social opportunities by their employer. "In fact, the number of social offerings provided was one of our most predictive variables in terms of whether someone was socially connected at work or not," she told me. Hadley also found that while fully remote work did seem to increase the risk of loneliness, it was less significant of a variable than whether a person was introverted or worked for an organization that held regular social activities for staffers.

The German study suggests that a holiday party can serve as the ritual capstone for these more routine coworker events, making year-end hobnobbing just a little extra special. While the ideal party activities will depend on an organization's culture, a few basic considerations — such as hosting the event somewhere besides the boring old office — go a long way. Elements of fun help too, whether they take the form of a themed photo booth, a creative dining experience, or, yes, a DJ.

A dash of festive foresight can make the difference between the raunchy affairs of yesteryear and a few hours of meaningful, PG-rated bonding between coworkers. "A nice holiday event gives people a break in their wallets and signals that the leaders value personal connections and socializing," Hadley said.

For a company's youngest workers, the benefits may last a professional lifetime.

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.

When "Sex and the City" debuted in 1998, the series captured public fascination for more reasons than what its title might imply. It wasn't just that the show's central foursome were women having lots of sex; they were women over 30 having lots of sex, and they were single. A "mid-30ish crowd of bed-hopping, hedonistic female night crawlers," a Los Angeles Times critic pointedly wrote. Their singlehood painted a picture of a titillating, and even threatening, new woman.

Through the '90s and '00s, American women "pioneered an entirely new kind of adulthood, one that was not kicked off by marriage, but by years and, in many cases, whole lives, lived on their own outside matrimony," the journalist Rebecca Traister wrote in her 2016 book, "All the Single Ladies." Now, unmarried women are no longer part of an edgy cultural vanguard — they're the official status quo. As of 2021, a record 52% of American women were either unmarried or separated, according to a report by Wells Fargo Economics. Single women also have single men outnumbered: A Census Bureau analysis of 2019 data found that for every 90 unmarried men in the US, there were 100 unmarried women.

While some women feel cornered into being single, citing a lackluster dating pool or the demoralizing experience of trawling apps, a growing share, call them Samantha Nation, are happy being on their own. In a 2019 survey from the Pew Research Center, only 38% of single women reported looking for dates or a relationship, compared with 61% of single men.

The rise of happily unmarried women has steadily shifted standards for what American adulthood looks like. But it hasn't come without a fuss from people who hold to a specific vision of the family. When JD Vance, now the vice president-elect, drew ire this summer over a years-old remark about "childless cat ladies," he doubled down on his insinuation that single women were symptomatic of Democrats' "anti-family and anti-kid" platforms; they were opting into a lifestyle that was fueling the erosion of the nuclear family, making them deviant by association. But research suggests it's misguided to pin the trend on shifting social mores. Women's newfound freedom to choose — not just whom they marry, but whether they marry at all — is due less to a cultural shift and more to a shifting economy. As men drop out of the workforce, American women have hit a new milestone: In August, the share of prime-age (25 to 54) women in the labor force hit a record high of 78.4%. Meanwhile, the median age of American women's first marriage has crept steadily upward, from 20.8 in 1970 to 28.3 in 2023.

The shift toward the single life has been a great development for women; for men, though, things aren't as peachy.

The way people feel about women's relationship patterns has a lot to do with a false cultural memory of what was normal in the past. The Rockwellian poster family of mid-20th-century Americana, with its happily married husband and stay-at-home wife raising 2.5 children in the picket-fenced suburbs, sank its hooks so deeply into the American imagination that it's easy to forget it was a historical fluke. In the immediate aftermaths of World War I and World War II, the nation saw momentary spikes in the proportion of single-income, male-breadwinner US households. The booms were over nearly as soon as they began. By 1970, 40% of the nation's married women, and more than half of its unmarried women, had jobs outside the home, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Even before 1970, it was far from unusual to see American women working for a living. The economist Claudia Goldin, who won a 2023 Nobel Memorial Prize for her work unpacking gender differences in the labor market, has noted that the gender gap in US labor-force participation steadily shrunk between 1890 and 1990. As more and more women were working for pay, deindustrialization in the '80s and '90s drove scores of men out of the labor market, shrinking the pool of those who could support a family.

Jess Carbino, a relationships researcher who formerly worked as a sociologist for Tinder and Bumble, told me that many people ascribed to a model of the family popularized by the economist Gary Becker in the early '80s, which said that single people were looking for partners whose market strengths complemented their own. By applying economic theory to the prevailing cultural ideas of the time, he concluded that because men were good at earning money and women were good at having babies and raising them, it's only logical that the two should join forces in the household.

The problem with that arrangement (besides its blatant sexism) is that men today are losing their economic footing.

"We're seeing men's labor-force participation rates really plummet, since the 1990s especially," said Elizabeth Crofoot, a senior economist and principal researcher at the labor-market-analytics firm Lightcast. "That gives women greater impetus to actually work on their careers and put in more time and effort to make themselves financially stable and not have to rely on someone else."

Of course, women's relative workforce gains have not translated into equal earning power; on average, US women still earn $0.84 per every $1 earned by men, according to the Census Bureau. However, a 2021 Pew survey found women were outpacing men in educational attainment. And a Pew analysis of government data found that in 2019, women began outnumbering men in the college-educated labor force. There's evidence that these shifts are fueling the move away from marriage. In a 2023 survey from the American Enterprise Institute's Survey Center on American Life, almost three-quarters of single, college-educated women cited "not being able to find someone who meets their expectations" as a reason they were romantically unattached. Only 54% of single women with no college degree said the same.

Against this backdrop, it makes sense why a growing share of Americans are single simply because they enjoy being single. Carmindy Bowyer is one of them.

"I'm very independent," Bowyer, a makeup artist and beauty entrepreneur in New York City, said. "I don't want to live with somebody. I don't want to have children. People out there don't realize that they have a choice."

Bowyer, who is 53, didn't always feel this way. While she always knew she would never have children, she caved to social pressure to marry in her 30s. Even her parents — who were happily married for over 50 years — questioned whether she was cut out for married life. "We were walking down the aisle, and my dad was like, 'You can always get divorced.' And I was like, 'Thanks,'" she recalled. "Sure enough, marriage didn't work out for me. And I was happy about it." Bowyer said she realized that she felt truer to herself when she was making day-to-day decisions about how to live her life entirely on her own terms. She just needed to give herself permission to do it.

For other women, the dating market has become a major turnoff. "Single women that I work with can feel very compromised by the whole process of trying to find a partner," said Stephanie Manes, a licensed psychotherapist who works with individuals and couples in New York City. "It can mean being treated in ways that are totally at odds with how these women see themselves — as smart, self-sufficient, empowered grown-ups. It can require them to lower their standards in pretty fundamental ways and force them to suffer through some really bad behavior."

Cultural attitudes have been slow to catch up to the not-so-new normal of singlehood. Traister's book quotes a passage from 1997 in which the writer Katie Roiphe, then 28, described her cohort of unmarried 20-something professionals as evidence of Americans' widespread failure to achieve adulthood on schedule. And being single today still generates some social stigma. A 2020 analysis published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that prejudice toward singles was viewed as more acceptable than prejudice toward other groups.

For women, however, the societal sense that they should be married has slowly but surely waned. In Pew's 2019 survey, just 35% of single women said they felt pressure from society to be in a relationship — a slightly larger share of single men said they felt the same.

Singledom also appears far more beneficial for women than men on average: Numerous studies have found that single women tend to be happier and healthier and live longer than married ones, while unmarried men have been found to experience markedly higher rates of depression, addiction, and loneliness than those with spouses. "If you are a man, you should probably get married; if you are a woman, don't bother," the author and behavioral scientist Paul Dolan quipped in a 2019 interview.

There are many hypotheses on why single men fare so much worse. Theories put forward by economists such as Richard Reeves and Nicholas Eberstadt suggest that male gender roles have been slow to catch up to labor-market realities, perhaps at the expense of many men's ability to thrive in the soft-skills-based 21st-century knowledge economy. Others theorize that men's loneliness starts in childhood and stems from societal pressure to keep their feelings hidden. While there are likely many factors at play, a common thread lies in the asocial and infantilizing mores of a patriarchal society that, in some crucial respects, may harm men even more than women.

Women, meanwhile, are finding joy and purpose in discovering new ways of living outside the nuclear-family norm. Platonic coparenting and cohousing arrangements between friends and the return of the multigenerational family home are just two recent examples of the changing face of the American household.

"In my book, I make the case that people who are single at heart are happy and flourishing because they are single, not in spite of it," Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist and the author of the 2023 book "Single at Heart," said. She has said that even within the past decade, there has been traction in what some call "a singles positivity movement." Now 71 (and still single), DePaulo said that current attitudes toward single professionals, in particular, are a far cry from her experience as a single 30-something woman in the workplace.

"Single people are still stereotyped, for sure, but now there is a greater awareness that some single people choose to be single and are happily single," she said.

Bowyer believes that social media plays a significant role in moving the needle. When she recently posted on TikTok about enjoying being single and child-free, the video attracted more than 4 million views and a flurry of positive feedback. It's a radical departure from the cultural feedback she and her Gen X peers received as young adults.

"We're so much more open and compassionate now — a more elevated society in some ways," Bowyer said. "You can find your tribe and be inspired by people that came before you."

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.