Give your festive season a twist with these alternative Christmas traditions
From present wrapping to cracker pulling, we’ve teamed up with MOTH to shake up some tired Yuletide customs…
Words: Jonathan Wells
In association with:
Here comes Christmas. It’s a sleigh-riding, joy-tiding time of year – or so goes the party line. But, the truth is a little less festive. Because, while the winter season should present an entertaining, enjoyable interlude, many of our long-time traditions now feel more tired, drier and burned-out than an over-roasted turkey. Thankfully, if you’ve found yourself faking your merry-making in recent years, we’ve found a spirited solution that’ll help you quaff your Christmas blues away.
MOTH was founded in 2021, and the British brand has spent the last five years dreaming up and developing some of the best pre-mixed cocktails we’ve ever had the satisfaction of sipping. MOTH's Mojito and zesty Aperitivo Spritz have already seen us through summer, and now we’re carrying the brand’s matte-black cans into winter.
Every one of the B Corp company’s eight available cocktails is produced using quality ingredients and, unlike many pre-mixed cocktails, each matches the strength of its namesake serve – no weak or watered-down imitations here. So, if you want to raise your Christmas spirits this year, here’s how to establish some fresh festive traditions with MOTH…
Party season should be merry, not messy
Christmas parties, whether thrown in our homes or offices, have a habit of getting a bit boisterous. Why? Because, at some point during the evening, all sense of self-restraint goes out of the tinsel-trimmed window. And every shred of this Christmassy chaos – whether it be bad dad dancing or befouling the photocopier – can be blamed on a single thing: home pours.
As any amateur mixologist will tell you, the scourge of most self-made drinks is our inability, when presented with a full-to-the-brim bottle, to pour a sensible, respectable measure. Maybe it’s Mariah soloing through the speakers, or perhaps it's the several flutefuls of champagne we down before hitting the hard stuff, but these bashes rarely work out well. An easy fix? MOTH's Margarita or Piña Colada, which are both reliably mixed and will save you time that you can then spend celebrating.
Milk and cookies just don’t cut it anymore
24 December leaves little time for mixing drinks. Most of our Christmas Eves flash by in flurries of last-minute shopping sprees, interminable family visits, and midnight paper cuts. It is, almost without exception, the most tiring day of the year. And, with all that stress and exhausting eleventh-hour wrapping, there’s often no room for fun. Gladly, MOTH is on hand with another canny solution.
The brand’s Espresso Martini is a tiny Christmas miracle, one that only demands you shake to wake it, and garnish it with coffee beans. It’ll get you through the late-night ribbon wrangling, bring a seasonal smile to your face, and means you don’t waste any extra minutes whipping up a pick-me-up yourself. So, forget the milk and cookies this Christmas Eve, and leave out a can of this chocolatey, smooth-sipping tipple for Santa instead.
It’s high time we bucked the Bucks Fizz
Come Christmas morning, there should be but one thing on your festive mind: presents. You should be tearing to the tree, sharing out the gifts and starting to unwrap before basting the turkey even crosses your mind. And yet, there are certain burdens that always slow the morning down. Chief among them? The mixing of the annual, awful Bucks Fizz.
Typically two-parts champagne to one-part orange juice (unless you buy the supermarket swill, which gives pre-mixed cocktails a bad name), Bucks Fizz has had its time. This year, instead, we’ll be filling our flutes with that finest and most festive of fizzes: a French 75. Lashings of lemon and a touch of pink make this the perfect cocktail to toast with around the tree. And MOTH’s take on the traditional serve, mixed with Tarquin’s fine gin, is of excellent, tastebud-tingling provenance.
Let’s try pulling a different kind of cracker
Once the Brussels are boiled and the pigs are blanketed, there’s only one more time-consuming tradition standing in the way of your stuffing. And, while Christmas crackers may be a classic part of the main day, we’ve got some notes. No more tedious jokes, please, or ill-fitting, forced-fun hats. But, it’s still nice to have something festive to trim the table – so, we’ve found a solution.
These cocktail crackers from MOTH are a refined, more celebratory alternative to traditional counterparts. Available in packs of four (and containing cocktails from Espresso Martinis to Margaritas), they are the new single-serve saviours of Christmas dinner. They also make perfect presents for any tricky Secret Santa picks, and are stellar stocking-stuffers.
Beat the post-dinner bloat with a strong digestif
And that’s it. Presents opened. Plates cleared. All that’s left to do is unwind into Boxing Day; idly eye the television; perhaps play a board game; and, to chase your festive feast, drink a much-needed digestif. The twin kings of this stomach-settling cocktail category are the Negroni and the Old Fashioned. And, to save you both time and energy, MOTH have created wonderful examples of each.
The brand’s Negroni, particularly, is top notch. It brings Tarquin’s Gin back into the mix, swirling it together with Asterley Bros’ London Vermouth to serve up a real lip-smacker. And the Old Fashioned, which enlists ingredients from both Bob’s Bitters and The English Whisky Co., is a spicy, aromatic send-off for even the most hectic of Christmas Days. For this, and many more seasonal reasons, we’re raising a glass, relaxing, and relying on MOTH to put a new twist on Christmas this year – and we recommend you do the same.
Want to learn more about MOTH? Here’s how the brand shook up the canned-cocktail industry…
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