Crisp cool air. Freshly fallen snow. Tinsel adorns every corner. All signs of the impending holiday season. And what do I think of when I think holiday cheer? Friends gathered around a fire, gaily signing carols? No. Potato latkes, applesauce and the warm glow of Hanukkah candles? No. Children bundled up in mittens, sticking carrots into giant balls of snow? Hell no.

I think of drunken nights, with no school and no responsibility. And I guess it’s not really the holidays that spur on my yearning for the sauce, it’s a year round occurrence. But the holidays are time for goodwill, cheer and reflection, So without further adieu I give you my fab four of a semester’s worth of cheery drunken escapades

Night 1: Marshall’s Bar and Grille, Georgetown

If there’s anything I like better than happy hour, it’s happy five hours. And what better place to spend an entire afternoon/evening getting wasted with 10 of your closest friends than everyone’s favorite neighborhood bar, Marshall’s. The time was 5 p.m. We had two hours until the $2 beer special ended and we were taking full advantage. Being the cheap college students that we are, we were ordering four beers at a time so we would keep the happy hour prices. The wait staff was more than accommodating (we realized why when we finally got the bill, luckily we were too drunk to care). Before we knew it, or knew anything at all for that matter, it was 10 p.m.

With happy hour more than over, we decided to take our party elsewhere. But where to take such a group of lushes on a late August night? Wait … what was this commotion coming from the Marvin Center? Ohhhh, a C.I. event … perfect!

After a quick stop by the house to grab some “juice for the road” we stumbled up to the Hippodrome. The elevator doors opened to platters of food, punch bowls and nervous freshmen. Heaven. We made ourselves some name-tags, but after some inappropriate grinding with some young’ns we decided our buzz was wearing off. A quick run across the street to Lindy’s should take care of that. We decided to go in shifts so we wouldn’t look obvious.

Minutes later the first group came back screaming, “he knew our names! The bartender knew our names!”

“Wow,” I thought as I headed over myself. “That’s cool.”

My friend and I walked in the door. “Hi ******, you girls want the same shot as your friends?” Jeff the bartender asked. Wow. I was dumbfounded. How did he know my name, and how did he know my friends were just here? We ran back to share the good news with our friends. It was hard to find them in the mess of pre-frosh. Thank God they were wearing nametags too …

2. Nation, Southeast

This was one of those nights that starts out with some sophisticated drinks on the waterfront but dissolves into a drunken melee of dinnerware being throw off a balcony into a four-foot deep pool. That’s what a few vodka Red Bulls and some trance music will do to you, I guess.

The fruity cocktails at Tony and Joe’s just weren’t cutting it on this warm early September evening. Neither were all the balding 30-somethings, hitting on anything in a tube top. We paid our tab and high-tailed it up 30th Street heading for our old faithful, Marshall’s.

We sat at the bar, sipping scotch and getting restless.

“This town is played out,” we complained.

The bartender heard our plight.

“How about Nation?” he suggested. “I go there all the time … I think I might go there later tonight.”

He was hot.

I said, “lesss go!”

Buzzed, my two guy friends followed me out the door.

We hopped a cab over to Southeast and soon saw spotlights illuinating goth-clad high school kids. Perfect. I liked having to go through a metal detector to enter. Made me feel real bad ass, no matter how much my J.Crew flip-flops and gap capris claimed otherwise. It had been a while since my last drink and the $20 cover kinda destroyed my buzz. To the bar! After some Red Bull and Stoli’s we did a lap around the three-floor club. So many glow sticks! So many drugs! So many weirdos! I loved it.

We went down to the main floor and, having honed my techno-dancing techniques in Spain over the summer, I jumped around like I knew what I was doing. When I went to get some free water (such a good idea) I was offered ‘shrooms, weed and E all at the same time. I settled for another drink.

Time flies by when you’re dancing on a deck with water mist spraying on you and by the time 5:30 a.m. rolled around, major fights were breaking out. Some sort of East side-West side techno war perhaps, so we headed back to Foggy Bottom. But how do you sleep after a night/morning like that? (In hindsight perhaps it was less the excitement of it all and more the combination of speed-like energy drinks paired with blood-thinning alcohol, but I’m no expert).

At any rate, my friend and I were jumping up and down on a pull out couch as my other friend cooked some sort of elaborate pasta dish. Apparently washing the dishes seemed like too much trouble and we began to wonder how cool it would look falling into the pool that sat outside below the balcony. Pretty cool I must say, but not as cool as the teacup my friend launched over the roof of the adjacent building.

3. Hell- Adams Morgan, not Hades

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I love 21st birthdays. So much scandal. So much beer. There was all that and more as we headed to Adams Morgan to celebrate my friend’s special day.

The bartender took a liking to one of my friends and even made a special drink named after her. I think that’s where things started to go downhill. For the next few hours the bar morphed into the Bermuda Triangle.

First, I look over and see my friend standing next to that guy who sells the roses at all the clubs. Then I realized, she’s not so much standing next to him as making out with him. Have you ever seen this guy! He’s pushing five decades, at that’s the least of his problems. I grab her away.

“Where you just making out with the flower guy!” I screamed. “Ohhh, I thought no one saw that,” she cowered.

“I did. Cut the shit.” That took care of that problem, or so I thought.

Every time I looked over, another one of my friends had a rose. Where were all these free roses coming from? I knew my friends would never buy them … one quick glance over at the flower man answered that question. There was my friend, making out with him for the (I counted the roses, one, two, three, four,) fifth, yes the fifth time. That’s nice. Prostituting yourself for half dead flowers. That’s special.

Night 4: Roxanne- Adams Morgan

The greatest drunken activity, besides the obvious, is definitely karaoke. And the best place for drunk karaoke is definitely Roxanne. You won’t find it listed in any entertainment guides, and I had never seen it until my friends and I stumbled in there early this semester.

My biggest complaint about karaoke is that you have to sit around like a jerk waiting for your song while other drunk people sing. Don’t people know that while my friends and I are funny when we are publicly drunk, everyone else is just annoying?

But at Roxanne people dance to the songs while they’re waiting. And the singers aren’t on a stage or anything, they’re right in the midst of everything. It’s like one big mess in the basement of a bar.

Things got messy pretty quickly as we ran in and put our names on the already lengthy list. We seemed to think that every group wanted us to sing with them, so we joined in on every song. When our tune, “Ain’t no Mountain High Enough,” finally came up, we fashioned a little dance that involved waving our hands over our heads on the word high, and swinging them below our knees on the word low. The whole bar joined in. Sweet.

Just when we thought the night couldn’t get any better, we found an old Jeep seat someone left on the sidewalk. Why would anyone leave such a treasure? We looked around and scooped it up before anyone else could claim it. My friend opened the front door to the cab, placed the Jeep seat in the taxi, sat on it, and calmly told the cabby our address. He looked at us like it was odd to be bringing our own upholstery on our ride home. Some people just don’t get it.