Yuletide Sipping: The Evolution of Holiday Cocktails

Sharkey’s First Christmas, a new holiday cocktail, rolls out this month at the four dozen or so bars hosting Sippin’ Santa, a seasonal bar pop-up created by Cocktail Kingdom. This drink is served in a custom mug featuring a shark that has clearly been overfed, and which has fearsome chompers and wears a Santa hat on its dorsal fin. The hat curls back to form a convenient handle. You know, standard holiday fare.

Christmas drinks have come and gone, but in the last decade they’ve entered a 3.0 phase—imbued with more creativity, more kitsch, a more impressive range of flavors. And holiday cocktails have become a more immersive experience.

The use of fancy ingredients like eggs and cream for the holiday was said to open the doors to good fortune the following year.

The very first holiday drinks were likely intertwined with drinks to mark the lengthening of days following the winter solstice. Eggnog evolved from posset, a monastic drink with origins in the 14th century, which morphed into a European Christmas favorite around the early 18th century. The use of fancy ingredients like eggs and cream for the holiday was said to open the doors to good fortune the following year.

When Europeans sailed west for America, they brought with them their holidays drinks and traditions; these thrived throughout the 19th century. In bars, wassail and hot whiskey punch cropped up around the “holiday trade,” as it was called in 1895 when The New York Sun reported on the scene. Amid “doors and windows of saloons … draped with holly,” customers headed for the huge china punch bowl at the far end of the bar that, the reporter noted, “attracted convivial spirits as a beehive attracts flies.”

The same reporter followed with a lament: “through the falling off of foreign immigration,” the celebration of old traditions had begun to fade. “Nowadays holiday drinks are no longer very popular in New York,” he wrote. “The American partiality for straight whiskey withstands any … allurement of holiday drinks.”

Two decades later came Prohibition. This did no favors for the holiday trade in drink. But with Repeal a dozen years later, America saw a refilling of the flowing bowl and a revived interest in Christmas spirits. Call this the 2.0 phase. Drinks of yore were celebrated and even fetishized.

Santa mugs modeled after the classic British Toby mugs proliferated, as did faux antique china punch bowls and sets of Tom & Jerry mugs. “What could be more appropriate as a decorative decor for Christmas glassware than the well-known Currier and Ives print of gaily costumed skaters?” asked a newspaper writer in 1950.

The predominant holiday drinks that went into the vessels were typically revivals, recalling olde-tyme holiday gatherings. “Nothing like eggnog to put any gathering in a holiday mood,” read one California account in 1955. “The wassail bowl is a convivial contribution to the holiday season,” noted The Baltimore Sun in 1960. Liquor producers sought to capitalize on the renewed thirst for adult holiday fare; “only Myers’s Rum can give that distinctive flavour to special holiday drinks,” insisted one ad.

These seasonal drinks held on in feral fashion in suburban houses and country clubs through the 1970s and ’80s, but declined with the general demise of sophisticated cocktail culture. Then came the cocktail-friendly 2000s, and it wasn’t long until holiday drinks were cranked up to “11.”

Miracle started in 2014, when Cocktail Kingdom founder and New York bar owner Greg Boehm opted to host a Christmas-themed pop-up in a partially renovated East Village cocktail lounge. New Yorkers swarmed in, and other bar owners inquired how they might replicate it. Miracle returned the following year, rolling out at four bars (it’s now featured at more than 150 worldwide). Sippin’ Santa—a tropical-themed Christmas pop-up—launched in 2015. In 2018 Boehm partnered with Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, the noted tiki archaeologist and proprietor of Latitude 29 in New Orleans, to craft a roster of holiday cocktails each year.

“The whole idea is to come up with original drinks, using combinations of flavors that are new and interesting,” says Berry. “Fortunately, half the work is already done because a lot of the flavors and aromas of the holidays are already ingredients in tiki drinks—like nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and allspice.” Sharkey’s First Christmas is one of the new potions Berry and his team devised this year. It’s made with vodka, aquavit, melon and walnut liqueurs, and lime and pineapple juices.

Other bars are also chasing after the Yuletide spirit. The Dead Rabbit in New York last year launched Jingle Jangle, “the first Irish Christmas bar pop-up.” Drinks include Reindeer Games, made with carrot, mascarpone, baking spices, egg white, lemon, and Keeper’s Heart Irish/rye whiskey.

Future generations will certainly look back on this era as one of the golden ages of holidays drinks. A prediction: Sippin’ Santa mugs will fetch a steep premium on the eBay of the future. Enjoy it while you can this holiday season. It’s the most wonderful time of the year.