Merry Christmas: We Wish Our Readers a Happy and Safe Holiday Season

The holiday season is here, which for most of us means the traditional gatherings with family, friends, and co-workers to share the joy of Christmas and the New Year.

For many, the Christmas holiday season marks the only time of the year when we will have the opportunity to see each other and catch up on the doings of the year that has passed. For almost all of us, such gatherings are bittersweet, because while we celebrate the glad tidings of the season, we also are reminded of those who no longer are with us.

Although the holiday season may be the happiest time of year (as the song goes), it also brings with it the invariable tragedies of the human condition, which more often than not are caused by overindulgence in alcohol. As we have written many times in this space, you can take every drug, legal and otherwise, and add up all of the misery they have caused, and that figure will not even come close to the toll brought about by alcoholism and excessive drinking by “social drinkers.”

It is the responsibility of all of us to ensure that where alcohol is present, it is not being abused, not only by ourselves, but by those around us at our holiday gatherings. None of us wants to wake up the next morning with the regret, “If only I had taken their car keys.” We wish all of our readers a happy, and safe, holiday week.