It's that time of year again when our pubs are jammed full of gurning office workers wearing garish woolly jumpers, downing pints and shots of vile liquors by the bucket-load, all in the name of seasonal good cheer.
Later on there'll be vomit on their shoes and they'll roll around in the gutters up and down the country.
The '12 Pubs of Christmas' is now an established tradition, a debauched bar crawl which involves having a drink in a dozen different pubs in the one day.
A woman participating in a 12 pubs crawl will down twice her weekly safe intake of alcohol and a man will go over his weekly limit by one and a half times.
Dublin pub guide Publin.ie have compiled a list of pubs who are avoiding the Christmas madness this year by refusing entry to groups partaking in 12 pubs shenanigans.
They include The Swan, the Long Hall and Anseo.
These bars cite lack of space and interruption to regular customers. The well-known comedian Des Bishop, who no longer drinks himself, hit the nail on the head when he tweeted: "The 12 Pubs of Christmas. Another branded binge. We have to stop theming our dysfunction."
Of course, getting drunk at Christmas is nothing new, what's novel is how alarmingly acceptable getting completely out of it has become.
The World Health Organisation's Global status report on alcohol and health 2014 found that 39pc of all Irish people aged 15-years-old and over had engaged in binge drinking, or "heavy episodic drinking", in the past 30 days.
This puts Ireland just behind Austria (at 40.5pc) at the top of the 194 countries studied and well ahead of our neighbours in Britain who are at just 28pc. As a nation, a worrying number of us tend to be bingers and December is when we justify our behaviour in the name of Christmas.
Source: Lorraine Courtney, Irish Independent, 17/12/14
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