Buy early to ring in New Year: Dry Sunday prevents alcohol purchase after midnight

Published 5:00 am Friday, December 30, 2016

If you plan to ring in the new year with a drink, be sure to pay for it before midnight — at least in Cullman County.

Even though Saturday’s New Year’s Eve activities will draw people nationwide to restaurants and bars well into the early hours of 2017, liquor sales in Cullman, Good Hope and Hanceville will cut off at the stroke of midnight.

All three municipalities have liquor ordinances that place similar restrictions on Saturday sales hours, and none allows the sale of alcohol on Sundays. Outside of Cullman, Hanceville and Good Hope, the remainder of unincorporated Cullman County is dry.

Cullman’s liquor ordinance — as well as Good Hope’s and Hanceville’s — requires local businesses to end their Saturday alcohol sales at midnight year round, so this weekend will be no different.

But even if elected leaders in the area’s wet cities wanted to make an exception for New Year’s Eve this year, they couldn’t. New Year’s Day falls this year on a Sunday, and local voters have not approved the sale of liquor on Sundays.

Some municipalities have made exceptions to their local ordinances, extending their serving hours during past New Year’s countdowns. But in those cases, New Year’s Eve fell on a weeknight — not a Saturday.

“It’s one of those cases where the local ordinance can’t trump state law,” explained Cullman City Clerk Wesley Moore. “And you have to have a vote of the people to have Sunday sales.”