Holiday Boozing and the Social Contract

I started writing this blog on Good Friday.

I know what Good Friday is...it's the day that Jesus died on the cross...right? Now I never went to Sunday school, but I do watch the History Channel. The other day they had a special on Bigfoot.

Enough flirting with my good-lookin' colleague Blasphemy and his friend I Am An Atheist (his parents wanted him to grow up strong). The point is that I have been struggling with the American Alcoholic's approach to the celebration of holidays, especially religious-themed holidays. By this I mean of course the normal person's tendency to celebrate with or without alcohol. In my experience it either goes very far in one direction or the other but then again, like Billy Joel, I go to extremes.

I grew up in a family that celebrates with alcohol. We celebrate the sunset with Tuaca and thunderstorms with Guinness. We do a champagne brunch on St. Swigglesworth day and a bloody mary lunch the day after St. Patrick's Day, and we always set out a glass of Bailey's for St. Nick. I grew up with this, and when I started drinking, I naturally transitioned into the culture. It's not about getting hammered in order to tolerate your relatives, it's about celebrating life by cliff diving with your all of your senses in slow motion, holding hands with your mom.

Alcohol, in my opinion, it at its best when it is helping people be at their best, in a type of communal ritual. For much of history it was reserved for this purpose (well, and for preparing for battle, but that is a communal ritual in sense). As large-scale production replaced the need for local, homebrewed alcohol, the nature of alcohol also expanded to encompass both a familial, celebratory atmosphere and a lonely, trudging existance. Despite what I may say when I sing my favorite karaoke song, I never drink alone. I know some people that do, and given that I live in Golden, Colorado, I know very few people that don't drink at all. For the purposes of this discussion those people have all been exiled to Utah, across which a high speed monorail ferry has been built on stilts.

Many people do use alcohol for celebration and most of these people tend to be moderate, social drinkers who know when to say "when", or "no, fuck that, I have to work tomorrow, seriously guys." It seems that those who drink in appropriate celebratory atmospheres are often the healthiest and most agreeable drinkers. They don't get too rowdy, and they drink well, savoring good quality spirits and creating an air of good spirit.

I have been exposed to a contrary opinion which holds that alcohol promotes drunkenness and is inappropriate for celebration. Beyond the fact that some people choose, as individuals, to abstain for their own valid and respected reasons, my best guess is that according to this opinion, intoxication is disrespectful to the person or event being celebrated and as such alcohol should not even be considered as any part of the situation. This is a valid point, especially because there's always that one cousin who parks their truck in the yard and hauls in a case of Bud Light, all of which end up getting put on the fencepost and shot at. Different versions of this person exist, but everybody has one. Sometimes he brings a bottle of gin, or she insists on a round of Amaretto Sours (for herself). By prohibiting alcohol, all behavior is more easily controlled, creating a benign and vaguely pleasant atmosphere.

People will always behave erratically, especially on holidays when they are forced to upset their own routines to play family politics with the in-laws. An appropriate atmosphere can allow the enjoyment of one of the greatest, most powerful, and most delicious triumphs of civilization, that of alcohol, without creating a situation that quickly becomes uncomfortable. Holiday drinking requires a social contract in which the enjoyment of all increased by ensuring that no one individual takes advantage of the situation. This is nearly the same social contract used by those who would ban alcohol in full. The primary difference is that in the former, there is a sense of mutual responsibility as well as heightened sensory and bodily experience, while in the latter, everything is scrubbed sterile in order to absolve those who wish not to engage in the spirit of the social gathering. It is an issue of shared responsibility versus the abolition of social responsibility, and it seems pretty clear to me which one is the more civilized.