If you were hoping to deal with the stress of family obligations this Christmas by drinking yourself into a stupor, you’re going to want to plan ahead. While you might think liquor stores would do a ton of business on Christmas Day, nearly half of the US states actually have laws in place that ban liquor sales on that very day.
Michelle Minton of the Competitive Enterprise Institute told Reason that these regulations are generally “part of the blue-law category,” meaning they’re rooted in religious reasons — when alcohol was initially banned on Sundays and Christian holidays — and date back to the end of Prohibition in 1933. “When the states decided to legalize alcohol again,” she said, “a lot of them instituted blue laws, and it’s taken this long for most of the states to slowly get rid of them.”
