The holiday season might be the most wonderful time of the year, but it’s also undeniably one of the busiest. Between dashing from store to store to scoop up gifts to attending party after party, the hustle and bustle is enough to throw anyone into a tizzy — and some things are bound to slip through the cracks. But what should you do if remembering to stock up on alcohol ahead of the big day is one of those things? Will liquor stores even be open on Dec. 25? The short answer is: maybe!
As Douglass recalled, the temporary respite from hard labor allowed slaves to tolerate their condition. Masters also used the holiday more directly, encouraging slaves to binge drink hard liquor: “One plan is, to make bets on their slaves, as to who can drink the most whiskey without getting drunk; and in this way they succeed in getting whole multitudes to drink to excess.” Binge drinking not only asserted the dominance of the slave owner, but according to Douglass, it also made working in the fields more attractive: “We felt, and very properly too, that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum. So, when the holidays ended, we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field,–feeling, on the whole, rather glad to go.”
https://werehistory.org/christmas-on-plantation/