News
New study confirms booze is America's favorite holiday coping mechanism
You love your family…in a vacuum. A living, breathing embodiment of “simpler times” and lightly conditional love, they mean a lot to you* (*from 500 miles away), and there’s no better time to show them how much while simultaneously testing the structural integrity of your personal glass house in the cold, hard arena of reality than the holidays. When that nostalgia cocoon casket does inevitably crack, however—sometime between that third consecutive piece of pumpkin pie and the debut of grandma’s new "friend" on Christmas Eve—your options are limited. You can always move your flight up to approximately eight minutes after however long it will take you to get from your parents’ house to the airport if you snuck out the basement door right now and just started running, but there's also a better (cheaper) alternative:
Booze. Lots of it.
This isn’t just some rejected National Lampoon’s script, though. According to a new study conducted by alcohol.org, practically any non-fatal liquid laced with alcohol is America’s quality-family-time tonic of choice. Based on a 1,000-person survey comprised of 43% women and 57% men, the study found that that a whopping 49% of respondents felt their family was more tolerable after the consumption of alcohol. Twenty three percent found that alcohol only made a bad situation worse while another 28% responded “neither”, which suggests they’ve given up altogether and are just going to let their nephew continue to hit them in the face with this foam sword until either A. Sweet, merciful death or B. Their damn sister does some parenting for once.
Interestingly enough, that 49% tolerability figure jumps all the way to 63% among respondents whose families frequently or always drink together, while climbing just 6%— from 23% to 29%—for those families who never drink together, proving that there are no universal truths and THINGS REALLY ARE JUST A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE AND CONTEXT, MOM.
Concluding the family portion of the study—which also analyzes the situational drinking habits of everyone from bachelorette party biddies to birthday bros—alchohol.org also asked participants which family members they would identify as “heavy drinkers”, with uncles (here’s looking at you, Jeff) edging cousins for the sloppiest spot. Check out the full results below and please note that the 1% of respondents who answered “daughters” is less a reflection of said daughters than the number of Good Dads™ involved in this study.
