This house conserves liquor.

The strip that appeared on 27 December 2009 inspired me to talk about the Pattersons and their love affair with alcohol. We know for a fact that they are not really averse to having beer, whisky, vodka and gin on the premises so it seems rather selfish of them to have almost gone dry; the only explanation that fits is that Elly is once again trying to reform her Mr Vice Guy kid brother owing to the misapprehension that he's some sort of drunkard. She and John can get pretty tight when they want to but her degenerate sibling needs to have his appetites curbed. It seems to me that since they've convinced themselves that they've set a good example for their children that they don't know how close to being problem drinkers Mike, April and Liz are. This is because we've seen a lot of strips that celebrate the younger Pattersons staying up all night and getting wrecked and talking about how that's a rite of passage; once they get older, they're supposed to drink themselves stupid in private where no one can see them. Even April is subject to the lures of strong drink; it was one of the things that reconciled her to being felt up by the Continental.