December 9, 2015 Article

The Old Coot rejects a Thanksgiving legend.

By Merlin Lessler

So there I was, making my annual Thanksgiving Day trek to Sleepy Hollow, New York (Formerly North Tarrytown) to my daughter Wendy’s house for a gathering of the clan. A chatterbox on the radio reported that more alcohol is consumed on the Thanksgiving Eve than any other day of the year. More than Saint Patrick’s Day. More than New Year’s Eve. More than Superbowl Sunday. Then, one of the other news reporters chimed in with, “Wow! I never would have thought that!” Chatterbox #3 added his two cents, “It makes perfect sense to me; people go back to their home towns and get together at bars and houses. It’s party time!”

I cringed a little as they bantered the subject back and forth. There always seems to be a gang on these radio and TV “soft” news shows. I guess the producers hope that in numbers, they might string together a coherent line of dialog. It seldom works. They all talk at once, and take a stupid idea and beat it to death. Their constant cross talk sounds like a symphony orchestra tuning up, every instrument playing at the same time, off key and out of tune.

I patiently listened to the Thanksgiving alcohol consumption discussion and finally erupted into one of my old coot explosions, and yelled, “BOGUS!! They made that up! That’s a total falsehood!” The “BOGUS” is something I picked up from listening to Car Talk on NPR. Tom yells, “Bogus!” whenever Ray starts in on a convoluted theory to explain why a caller’s car is acting funny.

The claim that Thanksgiving eve is the highest day of alcohol consumption is just plain bogus. But, it wasn’t just the chatterboxes on some lame New York City radio station perpetrating the assertion; TV, print media and social media ran with it too. One minute they tell us that the day before Thanksgiving is the busiest travel day of the year, and the next minute they tell us everyone is downing alcohol like it’s going out of style. So, how are all these travelers, weaving through long lines in airports and traffic nightmares on the highway, finding the opportunity to consume all that alcohol?

They’re not. The whole story line is a fabrication that stemmed from a west coast news feed, an interview with James Brown, owner of the San Pedro Brewing Co., a neighborhood brewpub outside Los Angeles. He said it’s so busy he has to bring in extra help to handle the crowd on Thanksgiving eve. And, thus was born, a new urban legend. To set the record straight, the top five drinking days in the U.S.A. are: New Year’s Eve, Christmas, Fourth of July, St. Patrick’s Day and lastly, Thanksgiving, the day, not the eve. This data is based on scientific study. I’m suspicious of that “science” too. Where is Superbowl Sunday in the line up? I’m starting to feel another urge to yell, “BOGUS!”