LEWISTON – How big a drinking event is the night before Thanksgiving?

John Whiting and his friends think it’s pretty big. Big enough to charter a bus for, anyway.

“It’s the biggest drinking night of the year, we hear,” said the 37-year-old Whiting, sitting with more than a dozen friends at Fast Breaks in Lewiston. “We had to come out and see for ourselves.”

So, they didn’t actually charter a bus. A friend owns a short one so they enlisted him to drive them to the bar.

“We’re pretty mellow,” Whiting said. “Just getting ready for Thanksgiving.”

According to just about everybody, the pre-Thanksgiving crowds don’t really get going until 9 p.m. or later. Earlier in the night and it’s business as usual.

Dinner time at the Blue Goose. It was a sparse crowd, not very lively. Just another night at the popular Sabattus Street bar.

“The people in here right now are between 45 and 60 years old,” said a Blue Goose worker named Bob. “The kids will come in later, around 10 o’clock.”

And not just any kids. Local bars were expecting groups of young men and women who have been away for a while. Young men and women in desperate need of a break with old friends.

“These are kids who are home from college for the holiday,” Bob said. “We get them every year.”

And so it went around the region. Young people coming home for Thanksgiving, skipping out on their parents just long enough to get together with pals from the old days.

Some bars were busier than others – in Lewiston, the Goose is always popular the night before Thanksgiving. In Auburn, Gritty’s usually has plenty of chairs filled as do Margarita’s and Rack M Up.

It’s a trend around the country. Kids home from the ardor of college want to get out and howl a little before committing to all the family traditions. Some bar folks say the night before Thanksgiving is the biggest night of the year. Others say that is a myth generated by advertising companies. Opinions range from one saloon to the next and from bartender to bartender.

“It’s absolutely a big night,” said Miles Millett of the bar Crazy 8 in South Paris. “Huge. I expect 400 people to come through that door tonight.”

Millett insists that the pre-Thanksgiving revelry is not for the young alone. At least not in South Paris.

“It’s a little bit of everything,” he said. “We’ll get people from 21 to people in their 40s or 50s.”

A trickle down effect comes into play. Where there are large numbers of people at the bars, typically the cab companies do well, too.

“It can get pretty busy,” said Joey Lanois, who drove a cab for 10 years in the Lewiston-Auburn area. “Although not as busy as New Year’s Eve. That’s the big one.”

By 7:30 p.m., the band Drive was just setting up at Fast Breaks in Lewiston. The bar doesn’t usually have a band on Wednesday nights, but they changed things around a bit in anticipation of a good crowd.

“It gets crazy busy,” said Bridgett Moffett, working behind the bar. “A lot of people are out having fun.”

Like the others, Moffett said things don’t tend to get raucous until 9 p.m. or later. And as bar crowds go, the early Thanksgiving drinkers tend to be less rowdy than most, filled as they are with holiday cheer. But are they all college kids?

Not at Fast Breaks.

“They’re not all young,” Moffett said. “We usually get an older crowd, to be honest with you. I don’t know why.”

It was all right for Whiting and his short bus gang. They came to Fast Breaks specifically to avoid the younger crowds.

“Rookies,” Whiting said. “We came here to avoid them.”