New Year’s Eve is one of a handful of holidays that expects, nay, demands its celebrants get blackout drunk. Of course we’re all going to drink on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Independence Day, but we’ll be drinking serenely as we slip away glass by glass of drugstore Merlot into a restorative stupor in front of a holiday TV special. New Year’s Eve is much more like a drinking contest, an evening-long 800-meter race to midnight, when you’ll cross the finish line of the old year with one final glass of Cook’s Brut before you projectile vomit all over your newfound soulmate, who you found earlier that evening calmly perusing the cubed cheeses and playing it oh so cool.
There’s plenty to worry about if you’re drinking lots of booze in a relatively short span of time, but the number one prosaic concern that people seem to fret over most is the dreaded New Year’s Day hangover. Fear not, bourgeois partygoers! Media outlets are here to save you from yourself. A quick perusal of the internets today will yield a slew of well-meaning articles and video tutorials from bonafide mixologists, like the boozepert who was on Fox & Friends this morning, or any of the bartenders offering breakfast cocktails to keep your stomach from folding in on itself like a masterfully-played accordion. The bottom line is, of course, keep yourself hydrated because, in keeping with our conceit, drinking your face off is just like being a humiliated, short-short-wearing member of your high school track team. Feel the shame wash over you as the other kids snicker at your chicken legs and be sure to drink plenty of coach’s syrupy Gatorade.
If you don’t know how not to avoid a hangover at this point in your drinking career, you’re either new to drinking or you’re a stupid person. Maybe you don’t give a shit about hangovers because you’re a real badass, or you want a legitimate excuse for watching The Princess Bride four times in a row tomorrow. Maybe you’re just looking for an efficient new hangover cure because drinking water straight from the garden hose didn’t go over well at the last New Year’s party you attended.
The point is, if you’re trying to avoid a hangover, you have plenty of options, like dubious herbal cures or a six-egg omelet sprinkled with crushed-up Ibuprofen. You might also disavow all your friends so that you have no holiday party to go to and you can just sit in your apartment all alone, lamenting your solitary existence, sure, but, most importantly, headache-free. Unless you go in for drinking champagne alone, in which case please stop depressing us with your sad life, jeez.
Going in for hangover remedies, however, is a sure way to sap the fun out of your holiday. I mean, fuck it, right? Just drink real hard and then fall into a queasy, dry-mouth stupor on your bed, feeling like the mattress is spinning up, up, up into space so you can spend tomorrow rollerblading on Saturn’s rings and making your dreams for the new year come true. January 1st is a fresh start, after all, so you might as well not start 2013 like a water-chugging coward who can’t handle a little headache and some epic dry heaving.
Three New York City bars provide hangover relief in the form of hair-of-the-dog cocktails [NYDN]
Image via Dimj/Shutterstock.