If you live in America, there’s a chance your life plays out kind of like this: wake up, go to class or work, get home and do homework, watch Netflix then go to bed. If you repeat this five times then it’s the weekend.
Once the weekend finally arrives, you can do almost whatever you want. Many people choose to get (as the cool kids put it) “friggin’ hammered, bro.” But as the holidays approach, don’t get caught up in the “this-weekend-is-special” mindset.
News flash: holiday weekends are just like every other weekend.
Honestly, there is really only one difference between holiday weekends, such as Halloween, and any other weekend: people put on costumes before they consume enough alcohol to make their parents question their methods of raising them.
My editor originally wanted me to focus on Halloween being the “alcoholiday” for this article, but it’s not just Halloween. People use every holiday as an excuse make binge-drinking socially and/or morally acceptable, when it already is in American culture.
Every weekend, sometimes on weekdays, college students in particular, get wasted. At one point or another during the week you will probably hear someone start a story with “I was really drunk and…” then they proceed to tell you a story that you don’t care about, but you don’t want them to know that, so you pretend to laugh.
Not that there’s anything wrong with binge drinking, brain cell loss and liver damage aside. If your Monday through Friday life really does play out the way I described, no one can really blame you for wanting to let loose on the weekends.
I’m not accusing all Americans or college students of being raging alcoholics, but binge-drinking is just a large part of our culture. We don’t need to say that we’re getting drunk because it’s a holiday; we’re getting drunk because it’s the weekend, and it might just happen to be a holiday.
Again, there are only minor differences between holidays and normal weekends. On Halloween people put on costumes and get drunk, on Thanksgiving and Christmas people get drunk with their families and throw a ton of shade, on Valentine’s Day people get drunk to celebrate being in love or being single, on St. Patrick’s Day people paint themselves green and get drunk, on the Fourth of July people get patriotically drunk.
The list goes on and on, but I’m just going to take a wild guess and say that you get the point. You can get drunk whenever you feel like it.
Cheers to American culture.
