Occasion
Christmas cocktails
Christmas cocktails lean into everything winter drinks do — warm spice, rich spirits, a bit of ceremony — and then add the specific, slightly indulgent flavours of the season itself: mulled wine spice, eggnog, cranberry, citrus studded with cloves. This is a newly added occasion tag and our recipe library is still catching up, so this page may be thin for now — the winter and celebration pages are good places to look in the meantime.
What christmas drinks have in common
Measured across the 8 recipes on this page, compared with the rest of the site.
- Citrus
- Only 38% use fresh citrus, against 59% elsewhere, so most of this list keeps without a shopping trip.
- Effort
- 88% are built straight in the glass rather than shaken or stirred, against 42% elsewhere — you can make these without a shaker.
- Alcohol-free and low-alcohol
- 25% of this list is alcohol-free or low in alcohol, so there is something to serve everyone without making a separate drink.
- Time
- A median of 10 minutes each, against 5 minutes elsewhere.
If there is food involved
A drink less sweet than the pudding it accompanies will taste sour and thin next to it. This is the pairing rule that most reliably goes wrong, and the fix is to match the sweetness or beat it.
Pudding, and afterwards, and the drinks that meet it →8 christmas cocktails
Sparkling Cranberry Mocktail
Tart cranberry juice lengthened with soda and lime — a bright, festive-looking three-ingredient mocktail.
