If there’s one thing the growing popularity of the “12 Pubs of Christmas” shows, it’s that Irish people will do whatever they can to get absolutely hammered.
. If that means co-opting a religious feast day, or organising a dance to signify leaving school, or buying a Christmas jumper and wandering the streets, so be it. December in Irish cities is already bananas. Restaurants introduce seasonal rules for group bookings that involve the delivery of one’s first born to secure a table on Friday night. Shops heave with present-buyers making their lists and checking them twice. Friends create schedules with precision, making sure everyone you’ve known gets a look-in and a Christmas pint before the 25th. To add the 12 Pubs on top of that is ludicrous.
For anyone still in the dark about this born-again “tradition”, the 12 Pubs of Christmas is a pub crawl where within each of 12 establishments a drink must be consumed. Different groups have different rules: time limits, forfeits, extra shots, different songs, bell-ringing and so on. But the general rules are common to all, and seem designed to amplify a sense of obnoxiousness that has no consideration not only for each other’s livers but also for the idea of decent socialising itself.
Tipping point
It’s interesting to examine how the 12 Pubs got so popular. A tipping point in the last few years moved the activity beyond something that happened in isolated cases, with friends meeting up for the festive period, to a one-size-fits-all booze orgy. Now that the backlash has already started there is also an awful lot of snobbery about the 12 Pubs. Snarky comments on Twitter with people at pains to point out that the 12 Pubs is not cool, the eye-rolls at the cheesiness of Christmas jumpers and the general intolerance that being able to comment about stuff online has taught us should mean the 12 Pubs would vanish from our December evenings. But it won’t.
Source: Una Mullally, Irish Times, 16/12/13
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