Atlantic Canada — Thanksgiving: a time for laughter, cheer, friends, family, giving thanks and, according to recent research, a time to get loaded.
On a quest originally designed to find out what it is most Maritimers were thankful for this year, The Manatee discovered a surprising trend: people living in the Atlantic provinces get drunk a lot on Mondays.
“My research suggests that people from the westernmost tip of New Brunswick all the way to the most northern reaches of Labrador like to get drunk on Mondays,” explained reporter Fiona Trent. “At first it wasn’t that surprising that people were getting drunk on Thanksgiving, given that it’s a holiday and all. But then it came to light that they weren’t actually celebrating the holiday, but just following through on their regular routine.”
Trent was conducting a survey for the uber-popular satire site when she accidentally made her discovery and changed what her report would be about.
“At first I was getting a bunch of typical responses about what people were thankful for,” she recalled. “Family, jobs, homes, food, smokes — the regulars. And then I made a joke about how someone was probably thankful that they get an extra day this week to get drunk, and the respondent looked at me all puzzled and said that it was just something they did every Monday.”
By the time she had interviewed a dozen different families from towns and cities across New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador, Trent realized that 11 of the 12 families interviewed all included at least one person who regularly gets drunk on Monday.
“People are always talking about how crappy Mondays are,” defended Peter Meeka who lives in Westville, N.S., “so what’s the big deal if I like to have one or two or nine beer after I get home from work? Everyone knows that hardly any work gets done on a Tuesday morning anyway.”
Trent did admit that her research doesn’t have a large enough sample size to be definitive, but she is confident that the results are “probably mostly sorta accurate.”
“I was doing some interviews by phone and the other ones in person around Saint John,” she said, detailing her research methods, “and the third place I stopped offered me some Alpine and the rest of the night just kind of got away from me.”