Holiday Party Speech After a Hard Year (About 2 Minutes)

The toast

I've given this speech every December for nine years, and most years it's easy. This year I threw out two drafts, because they made it sound like everything was fine, and you would have known better.

It was a hard year. We said goodbye to people we liked and worked beside for a long time, and I know a lot of you are still carrying parts of their jobs on top of your own. I'm not going into the details tonight. You lived them, and this isn't the place. I just didn't want to stand up here and act like it didn't happen.

Here's what I want to remember from it, though. In the spring, Kay brought a card table from home, set it up in the empty office at the end of the hall, and put a thousand-piece puzzle on it. A lighthouse. No announcement. People just started stopping by. Les did the whole sky, which is the worst part of any puzzle. Some days there were four or five of you in there at lunch, not saying much, fitting pieces. It was finished the week before Thanksgiving, and it's still on that table. Nobody has been willing to break it up.

That's what got us through. It wasn't a plan from me. It was you, looking after each other, a few pieces at a time.

I won't stand here and promise you things about next year I can't promise. But I'm proud to work here, with you, and I want you to know I noticed.

Please raise a glass. To all of you, and to the lighthouse.

Why it works: It admits the year was hard in a few plain sentences and skips the details the party isn't the place for. Then it spends its time on one quiet thing the team did for each other. It makes no promises about next year, which is why the room believes the rest.