I was skimming a Merriam-Webster dictionary page looking for words that meant "drinking party", and I found one that matched what I was looking for exactly. The word is "symposium", but unfortunately, that word now commonly means "a meeting at which experts have discussions about a particular subject." (from Oxford Dictionary)
I looked in the Thesaurus for synonyms of "symposium", but it only showed synonyms for the other meaning (a meeting).
Is there another word for this, or is it okay to use this word anyway in the hope that readers will understand what I mean? Or is it better to be more clear and just say "drinking parties"?
EDIT: the word I am looking for does not need to indicate that the sole purpose of the party was to get drunk. It means more like the party served an abundant amount of drink (see this page for the actual definition I am talking about).
EDIT 2: Here is an excerpt from The Great Gatsby:
There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On weekends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city, between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. On Mondays eight servants including an extra gardener toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.
Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York — every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulp-less halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.
At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.
By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived — no thin five-piece affair but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors and hair shorn in strange new ways and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.
Sample sentence: "During the Roaring Twenties, people who were sufficiently rich often went to parties hosted by rich people, which were often [drinking parties]."
What I am looking for is a word to describe the parties that Gatsby hosted.