When I got married we had no booze.
My wife has relatives that you don’t want to put booze in front of.
I don’t mean they’re recovering alcoholics. There’s no recovering for them.
We still had plenty of guests, people enjoyed the good food we had served (a local amazing Italian place catered) and there were no injuries, destruction of property, or lawsuits.
A few Christmases ago, I was the only drinker of alcohol, and my BiL was pouring glasses for me from a bottle he got as a gift from one the doctors he worked for. It was delicious! I finished the bottle over about two hours (while munching most of that time), and I didn’t feel inebriated at all. Also, I was not the designated driver, so no worries on that issue.
After the first bottle was gone, he opened another bottle he’d bought. I only drank about half a glass. It just wasn’t very good compared to the first bottle. Kind of an opposite situation to the Marriage Feast at Cana story.
Indeed, I think the OP’s circle of acquaintances must be near-tea-totallers. There’s a reason that a standard bottle of wine is 750 ml. It’s enough to last through an average-size simple dinner and impart a mild buzz to two people. It’s therefore hardly unusual that on special occasions one adult might consume twice as much, or the equivalent of at least one bottle or more. I’ve certainly consumed the equivalent of an entire bottle or more of red or white in one sitting and not thought it to be anything exceptional – it’s downright hard to avoid with multi-course dinners with wine pairings.
Many people have a bad relationship with alcohol, but I wouldn’t call our societal relationship with alcohol “toxic”. I have never, in my youth or any other time, experienced peer pressure to drink. As a society I think we recognize the potential problems with alcohol and treat it accordingly.
It really depends on what the event is. A typical many hours long family thanksgiving I can easily finish a bottle without approaching getting drunk. 5 glasses in a 4 hour period? People think that’s a lot? By the end I would be at or close to .00% BAC. Now if it’s a dinner out at a restaurant that would be different. That’s what we are doing this year and I’ll probably have two glasses.
In the US, about 33% of adults don’t drink, another 46% have <=3 drinks per week, and another 15% drink 4 to 14 (men) or 4 to 7 (women) drinks per week. A bottle of wine is 5 glasses.
I don’t know what the right conversion is, but it doesn’t seem totally unreasonable to use 1 week of typical drinking as 1 full day of holiday drinking. If so, then roughly 2/3 of the people will only need half a bottle of wine. Two or three glasses.
Moderate drinkers are more like a full bottle, but are only 15% of the population. Heavy drinkers are a small portion at 5%, but drink vastly more than the rest. It doesn’t seem healthy to pander to them.
There’s a good chance that if you are buying a bottle per person, the majority are still only having a couple of glasses each, while the rest is entirely consumed by the moderate and heavy drinkers.
You also have to account for people like me - I would be in the 3 drinks a week or less group. But that’s mostly because I don’t drink all that regularly. When I’m on vacation I might have five or six drinks a day (starting with a mimosa at breakfast) and not have another drink until I’m on vacation again. Holiday drinking - depends on which holiday and how long I will be there but could definitely get to four or five if it’s an 11 am to 7 sort of day. .
That’s fair–like I said, I don’t really know what the right conversion is between typical vs. holiday drinking. I’m not so different myself in that in a median week, I have zero drinks, but will likely have a few on holidays. Still, I suspect that the enormous ratio between light vs. heavy drinkers is there even on holidays, even if it’s less extreme than the typical case.
Of course, there’s also the fact that light vs. heavy drinking is likely correlated within families and friend groups. Some families will be teetotalers and others will all be heavy drinkers.
In my experience, party guests finish all the booze, and not only on Thanksgiving. IMO the New York Times’s advice that “too much is better than not enough” is sound. [And a bottle of wine is not that much. I mean, you should not be drinking one every day, but we are talking about a holiday party and some people will indeed drink that much.]
This is me, to a tee. I rarely drink except at festivities, and then based on how long I’m going to be in attendance and if I am driving home. For a long visit, I can get through a bottle of wine in a day. And never feel more than a pleasant buzz.
When I entertain, I tend to follow a bottle-per-person rule. Almost invariably, there are bottles left over. But that just means I have host/hostess gifts bought ahead whenever I am next invited to a gathering. No down side, in my view!
The worst alcohol etiquette I ever encountered was by a couple who were not invited to my dinner but invited by friends of mine who brought them along to dinner. One of those, “Oh, she won’t mind! She always has plenty!” type deals. But this wasn’t a buffet. It was a sit-down dinner for which places had been set, and accommodating two extra was problematic.
So in fact I did mind. It was also an expensive dinner to give and while there was plenty, I do not even like these people.
They brought the cheapest, nastiest bottle of wine they could find and then – again uninvited – immediately started throwing open cabinet doors in my kitchen, searching for the booze. I closed the doors firmly and said, “We’re having wine tonight,” and while I would dearly have loved to inflict their horrid wine on them, I wouldn’t do that to the rest of my guests. So I served good wine to the jerks but at least I kept them out of the expensive scotch.
Good luck, OP! Only you know the drinking habits of your friends and family. 
Something like three quarters of my friends drink no alcohol, and my extended family is made up of light social drinkers (the two that weren’t have since died). One or two glasses at most in a social evening, and no one drinks before or during lunch. I’ve had wine sitting in my cupboard for up to a year before it occurs to anyone to crack it open. I suppose this is anomalous.
Not so anomalous. My friends and family are the same. Very few serious drinkers and many who never touch the stuff. Not for any health or moral reasons, they just don’t like it.
Someone said it gives them a “pleasant buzz”. It gives me an unpleasant buzz.
I drink rarely. I can’t think of the last time I drank.
I can drink quite a bit on the right occasion but those occasions aren’t often. One issue is that I’m often on a ketogenic diet and a small drink will affect me like a whole bottle. While that might sound awesome, it’s not. You skip from the “pleasantly buzzed” directly to the “extremely sick” phase.
So, for example, no drinking for me on Thanksgiving. But come Christmas I’ll probably do a fair amount,
I get that pleasant buzz with a half glass. After that I get dizzy and the world gets really weird and semi-unfathomable. I can’t think that’s what happens to most people.
So where’s the fun in that? 
'Zactly. It takes 2-4 hours to eat a nice dinner. Having a bottle per person along the way, plus perhaps an aperitif and/or digestif fits right in. Done right, it’s another highly crafted gourmet product no less than any solid course of the meal.
Some of we do. Several of we don’t. And those are the troublemakers who energize the bluenoses.
Sounds about right.
Thank you all for the responses. Very insightful. It sounds like while my crew has some company with our “near-teetotaler” status, we are by no means the common case and the NYT recommendation is pretty sound (and in some cases too light ).
One aspect that I did not take into account is the “all-day” celebration. In our case, we typically follow the same rough schedule; gingerbread house building, outdoor activities (Frisbee, volleyball, walks, etc.), followed by dinner and relaxation. So the wine is primarily consumed with dinner and not all day (we also don’t usually linger at the table). We also decide on a special “holiday” drink every year that most people try, so it cuts into the wine consumption I think.
Some great ideas! Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate.
This actually makes sense. Last year we were eating turkey sandwiches into June after following their “one turkey per adult” recommendation.
Same, although the football game is on in the background. But, happily, very little conflict.
That sounds lovely!
That is a great idea. I am going to do that next year.
Thank you! Sorry to hear about your awful experience with the uninvited guests.
I laughed out loud for real at that one.
Well played, Good Sir! Well played.
You just know this is capitalism by the wine council. They’re probably also heavy drinkers.
I once drank an entire bottle of port wine. I don’t recall how long I enjoyed the buzz, but I don’t think it was longer than I was throwing up in the shower later.
Actually, a good hostess does his best to make sure there is plenty to go around so I think this is a decent recommendation.
For an average dinner my gf and I finish a bottle of wine. For any kind of holiday dinner, we open and finish a second bottle. For a party, I’d much rather have some booze leftover. I don’t want my guests drinking the vanilla extract and such.