(raises hand) I’m a researcher with a Ph.D. I work for a small tech company. I had the big list of "no…"s above.
Every year, we have a holiday party at a local restaurant some time in December, starting at noon, and everyone gets the rest of the day off. At the end of the party is usually when they distribute the annual bonus, which generally amounts to just under a week’s pay, depending on how business went that year (I think this year has actually been pretty good). We also get 2 days off for Christmas, no matter what day of the week Christmas falls on, so this year it’s the 23rd and 24th.
We get a bonus of a week’s pay, which is always welcome. And we have a staff Christmas party - free beer & wine, nice food and good music. We also got a bonus at the end of our financial year, as the company has made a decent proft that year. It’s a small company, and the word is they’re interested in the John Lewis model of employee-owned busineses, although I can’t imagine they’d be able to fully adopt the scheme. It’s be nice though - last year all the employees got about a month’s pay as a Christmas bonus.
Current employer is by far the best ever in this (and other) regard:
We usually get a bonus which varies around 1% give or take. Certainly not Wall St. level, but still significant. Even last year which was record bad, there was still something.
We also get $30 gift certificates for the local Gourmet grocery store/butcher shop. One each for Thanksgiving and Christmas…basically enough for a nice turkey, ham, goose, or whatever the vegetarians want from there.
Then they have a nice Holiday party at a local Indian Casino/Hotel. Beer, Wine, (cash for mixed drinks) nice sit-down dinner and dancing with a live band. Serious door prizes: Some years the big prize has been a car. (Prius three years ago) Lots of $500 gift card prizes besides…pretty much everyone will at least know a winner well. They also give out $20/person vouchers for the Casino, which you can just cash in if you are not into gambling like I’m not…So they actually pay everybody to go. Sadly I won’t be able to make it this year.
Hey, we work for the same company!
Wow. That sounds borderline (hell, no “borderline” about it) illegal.
We don’t get Christmas bonuses, ever. There is an annual profit-sharing bonus paid out in March that’s a nice chunk of change (though I always jack up my 401(k) withholding so I see about a sixth of that). They have, for the last couple of summers, had a picnic at a large-ish theme park (but now we have to pay for the tix ourselves, admittedly at a substantial discount).
**Typo Knig’**s old job had Christmas bonuses for a while then things got tight and they stopped. It was often 1-2 weeks pay. One year, however, it was 10 weeks for everyone (and more for him as he’d been key in a VERY profitable year). At his new job, they gave everyone an extra day off for each of Christmas and New Year, which was pretty nice since he’d just started and so had no vacation time.
I’m a teacher. Because insurance costs went up a lot this year, I received a $150 per month pay cut.
I don’t get a holiday bonus at this job, and our party is going to be a potluck during work hours, so whatever. We had the opportunity to get a company-wide bonus based on a customer satisfaction survey, but it’s not looking good. But I get decent benefits and tuition reimbursement and accrue about 6 hours of paid time off per pay period, so I can’t complain.
The only job I ever got a holiday bonus was as front desk attendant at a condo, where I worked 16 hours a week. I worked there 2 years and got about $250 in cash at Christmas. The full time people got about 3 times as much. That was pretty cool.
Wow, I know I have a pretty good gig, but I am surprised how few incentive bonuses are out there. Our full time employees all have nice bonus plans with potential payouts of 20-25% of salary. This year everybody will get 90-95% of this amount based on exceeding two of our main goals and coming close on the third. We were fully funded last year.
My bonus is a higher % of salary as a director, but I don’t get mine until February when the final accounting for 2010 will be complete. I do get a cash payout in June and December tied to stock performance so that serves as the Christmas bonus for me. Our company is also liberal with other incentives. There is a profit sharing bonus in April, annual full expense paid trip to a tropical locale for approximately 1500 top performing employees and spouses, very swanky Christmas party in all our locations, and a gift that varies each year.
We are lucky in many respects, but we work HARD for these benefits. I put in 60+ hour weeks, traveled close to 150,000 miles this year, and have aggressive goals every year. If we miss the goals, most of those juicy perks go away. But, our founder built a culture of genuine relationships, team focus, really rewarding folks who perform and getting rid of folks who do not. And it works.
My gf gets an end of year bonus if production exceeds a certain set point. Last year it didn’t, this year it does. They also get a second “xmas bonus” if they have completed their timesheets on time a certain percentage of the time. Out of several hundred employees, two were told in October that they were not going to make it unless they were perfect the remainder of the year. Neither paid the warning any mind and now they are complaining about not getting the bonus (about 2 k).
Nope, and from the looks of it, no holiday party this year, either. Neither full company nor departmental.
After reading this thread, I need to go kiss my boss.
We have an office pot luck luncheon in which the employees provide the sides and desserts and the company buys the ham or turkey. We close at noon that day and get paid for the entire work day. The company provides gift cards for games and a monetary prize for employee of the year which is announced at that time.
We have a night event which is very nice with a wonderful catered meal and unlimited drinks for the employee and a guest fully paid by the company.
We receive a bonus in the amount of $500 for the part time file clerk that just started in September to $10,000 to the supervisors with the average being around $6000 per person.
I have been with this company for 15 years and I am not going anywhere. Very rarely does employee leave that does not die, move or decide to be a stay at home parent.
I’ve worked many jobs in many different fields, and only once did I receive a Christmas bonus. It was a nice company lunch (the company only had about 14 employees) in a fancy restaurant and $300.00.
I think Christmas bonuses are pretty much a thing of the past – “You want a Christmas bonus? You’re lucky you’ll have a job when you come back from Christmas.” 
No bonuses, but this is the time of year that a lot of us sell vacation or comp time.
My girlfriend got a bonus this week, and it totally made her day. It was completely unexpected, and now she’s getting a netbook for herself for Christmas.
I work for the state of GA. We have never gotten a bonus, and in fact haven’t even gotten a cost of living raise in three or four years, despite the fact that our health insurance (and everything else, for that matter,) has been increasing. So, I am bringing home about $120 or so less per month than I was back then. Lucky me.
My company has a profit sharing plan that pays out in July and January. Half of the July bonus is held until January, so assuming we make a profit in the second half we get a nice bonus. It’s too late to be a Christmas bonus, I suppose, so let’s just call it a Christmas Credit Card Bill bonus.
Another non-profit worker who has got nothing but a Happy Holidays email to speak of.
My husband got his first Christmas bonus ever this year. he brought it home today. 
We were both very surprised by it because he got a bonus in August on his hire date anniversary. This is actually his third bonus of the year. It’s roughly 1 week’s pay and comes at a very good time for us.
He’s working for a very small company with two partners and three employees (plus one of the partner’s wives who does the day to day bookkeeping.) They are a great group of people to work for and they really value him as an employee.
In the past he’s been a cog in the works of national health care companies. We appreciated the one that bothered to send out frozen turkeys for all the employees at Christmas time. The other one sent out Christmas cards. Nice, huh?