Sobriety Season: Is it “if” or “when?” | Sober and Unashamed

For us imbibers, the calendar can be divided into three drinking seasons.

The holiday season starts about mid October for most. I am an overachiever, both as a lush and as a lover of scary movies, so my holiday season starts on October first, sharp. The holiday season runs through the fourth quarter of the college football national championship game when one SEC team that I don’t care about crushes the year’s eager victim. Between the bookends, the excuses to drink line up in an organized, dependable, evenly spaced out succession making sobriety unthinkable, and moderation a celebratory faux pas. Drinkers have plenty of reasons to drink during the holiday season.

Next comes the short days and cold nights of the seemingly endless season of winter. For many of us, especially those of us with a regimented commitment to the consumption of a powerful depressant, winter is a battle to keep our mood and attitude out of the pit of despair. It is during the winter season that our drinking is the most medicinal and seemingly necessary. Drinkers have a subconscious need to drink during the winter season.

We are now on the precipice of the third season of the drinker’s calendar: summer. Schools take a three-month hiatus, public pools open, and mowing the lawn makes its triumphant return to our weekly…