Lite fare: Toasting the gods

Today, students make the great exodus from the campus for a holiday gone wild. The sun is shining, birds are chirping and stink bugs are hatching, which can mean only one thing: Spring break is here.

This weeklong seasonal vacation wasn't always the booze-fest it is today. In fact, its American roots date back to the 1930s. Although the Greeks and Romans were perhaps the first to celebrate the season of fertility by worshipping their respective gods of wine, it was a swimming coach that brought the debauchery to the United States.

Sam Ingram coached men's swimming at Colgate University in 1936 when he took his team south to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. to train at the first Olympic-size swimming pool in the state. Two years later, banking on what it thought could be a revenue generator, the city hosted the first College Coaches' Swim Forum, which drew hundreds of college swimmers to the city. Soon enough, the tradition was born and every year more and more students would make the journey south.

That said, popular culture certainly helped elevate spring break to great heights. First came the 1961 film Where the Boys Are. Set in Fort Lauderdale and starring the young but just as crispy George Hamilton, the film centered around college students finding love while on vacation. In the 1980s came the originally-titled film Spring Break starring Tom Cruise and Shelley Long. And not long after that came Girls Gone Wild, whose creator, Joe Francis, has since been found guilty of child abuse and prostitution.

Eventually, "Fort Liquordale" said "enough" in 1985 when student crowds began to number more than 350,000 and were causing chaos without actually contributing much to the economy. The city enacted harsher public drinking laws and the mayor appeared on Good Morning America to tell students to party elsewhere. But by that point, spring break had ingrained itself in collegiate culture and spread across America's beach towns.

And so it remains today: Every March and April, thousands of students from this university and universities across the country make the migration south to clear skies and warm water. Like a drunken gaggle of geese, they invade cities from the Carolinas to those in the Caribbean and Mexico. With them, they bring whatever pent-up aggression they may have toward an exam they took just 48 hours before and the intention of taking that aggression out on their livers. Indeed, as one spring breaker told TIME magazine in April 1959, "It's not that we drink so much, it's that we drink all the time." Some things, it seems, never change.

Spring break has its absurdities. The excessive sexual looseness and binge drinking leave many with forgotten memories and others with souvenirs best left behind. Some push it too far — but then again, there are those who do that no matter what week it is.

But as you embark for your various destinations, whether it be Cancun or your Commons apartment, stay safe and do not forget your roots. The Greeks and Romans may have been off on a few things: The earth certainly isn't flat, and last we checked there are no centaurs running around College Park. But on the idea of a spring awakening, they couldn't have been closer to the truth. After all, spring break is a celebration of renewal. Here's hoping that, in a week's time, we will all be uplifted — and not just hungover.