Holidays are jollier with wine, other drinks flowing

Say what you will about the holidays, but November and December are my favorite months to be an eater. November starts off with freshly on-sale, post-Halloween candy and caps off with the best leftovers of all time, while December is just one big monthlong graze toward a Champagne-fueled finale. From family dinners to late-night parties, I love any reason to bring people together and open up a few bottles.

I didn’t grow up with alcohol at my family’s holiday gatherings. Up until my generation, most of my family descended from a solid line of teetotalers. Thankfully, as my cousins and I have grown up and taken over the annual hosting duties, the alcohol has moved inside from the garage where we used to sneak bottles of rum and whiskey without our parents knowing (once we were of age, of course!), and into the kitchen — it still hasn’t made it to the dining table yet.

As an adult, alcohol — wine especially — has become one of my favorite parts of the holidays, Thanksgiving especially. I love opening special bottles and sharing them with people who would otherwise never get to try them. These few special sips once a year still haven’t turned my family into connoisseurs, but they give us something new to connect on, even if it’s just for the time it takes them to swallow and open their next Bud Light.

I love hearing about people’s holiday traditions surrounding alcohol. There are families where gifting bottles and sometimes even cases of booze is the norm and, of course, there are even more families like mine where alcohol is just the unspoken social lubricant that helps us stave off a shouting match over what really happened to that lectern.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll take a deeper dive into all the things you should be drinking this holiday season (and even a few things to avoid!). First up, of course, will be Thanksgiving — the Super Bowl of $15 bottles the world over. (I hate to spoil a future column, but my opinion hasn’t changed: a big, boozy punch is the way to go.) I’ll have recommendations from beverage professionals from across the state and even throw in a few gift ideas along the way.

Consider this a call for your holiday questions and conundrums, those tricky-topair dishes, hard-to-buy-for lushes in your life, and all the good family gossip. I promise the family gossip (probably) won’t make it into future columns.

As always, you can see what I’m drinking on Instagram at @sethebarlow and send your wine questions and quibbles to sethebarlowwine@gmail.com