How to Celebrate
We use the term libation a bit liberally these days. A libation usually is an alcoholic beverage poured out on the ground in honor of a deity.
Still, a libation signifies a ceremony of sorts, and ceremony usually comes attached with a celebration.
For more years than history remembers, celebrations have been powered not by finger foods, dancing or great music. Just the opposite in fact, celebrations, and all they entail, are powered by CnH2n+1OH, which, if I could figure out how to drop the numbers down a half line, is the general formula for alcohol.
Alcohol, for better or worse, is the catalyst for good times. The physiological affects of wine, beer or spirit on us certainly adds the color of emotive celebration.
Our path through life is as fraught with celebration as it is with tribulation. Or, perhaps the two go hand in hand, which is why we’re as likely to drink to escape our perception of suffering as we are to gain a celebratory frame of mind.
Alcohol, in its less offensive roll as an agent in beer, wine or distilled liquor, plays a much bigger part in our lives than we often realize. From the champagne that flows for wedding celebrations to the shots of whiskey poured at a wake, alcohol plays into so many life situations, though we don’t often stop to realize them individually.
Because it is there in between too. We celebrate a good day at work with a beer or a martini just as we celebrate the end of a bad day of work with a beer or a martini.
We didn’t create alcohol to boost our celebrations. Alcohol was a mysterious, magical thing until we figured it out. But long before we figured it out, we drank to honor valor, and we drank in defeat. But always it was a celebration of something.
Since prohibition, since some people determined alcohol to be the cause of all evil of all sickness and wrongdoing, we have struggled to reconcile our predilection toward alcohol fueled celebration with a false guilt established on nothing more scientific than a guess.
Beer, wine and liquor are a part of our collective culture going back not hundreds of years but thousands of years. And where alcohol, in its refined western style, isn’t part of the culture, there often is a stand-in or an alternative for lack of a better description.
Take kava in Fiji for example. This peppery, earthy flavored drink has no alcohol in it, but the celebratory feelings it induces are every bit as strong as that of wine, beer or your favorite cocktail for that matter.
Why am I bringing this up now? Well, because fall is the time in which we gear up for some of the biggest celebrations of the year. The Holidays, as we call them, are just big events in between which we celebrate many other events.
Life is an event. A beer to celebrate the end of a good day, bad day or the return of a long-lost friend are all appropriate. An understanding of why we celebrate is perhaps more important than analyzing why we drink at a celebration.
More soon.
Prost,
GG
Hey – great stuff.