A Holiday Cocktail Gathering is a Fun Tradition to Carry Through Each Year

My family has the tradition of getting the Christmas tree and decorating for the holidays the Friday after Thanksgiving. We get up and trek over to the tree lot and have first pick of all the trees available. We take the kids and the four of us stomp around, taking in the fresh pine scent. From this old tradition, a new tradition was born. A few years ago, when we finished decorating and the house looked like something that belonged in the "At Home" section of Yahoo! Shine, we thought "Let's have some holiday cocktails and invite the neighbors over. Get in the holiday spirit!"

The good thing about traditions is that they can be enhanced each year. This year was made better by picking one spirit: vodka, There isn't always the room for all the different spirits required to make the plethora of cocktails that exist and it can be expensive trying to buy a variety of spirits and mixers.

With vodka you can make fun drinks like Sex on the Beach to sophisticated drinks like a martini to interesting drinks like the Moscow Mule to traditional drinks like a Bloody Mary. It's versatile! Since this tradition isn't supposed to break the bank, we made our cocktails with ingredients we had on hand. Only vodka and a small bottle of ginger beer were not readily available.

Making a good cocktail is like making a good dish - it's all in the ingredients. So start with good vodka like the Russian Standard from Russia.

Try the Moscow Mule: mix 2 oz. Russian Standard vodka with 4 oz. ginger beer; squeeze juice from a lime wedge into the mix and throw the wedge into the mix as well. Make sure to use plenty of ice. Originally this drink was served in copper mugs. Lacking copper mugs, I improvised and used aluminum root beer float tumblers. Great drink! Makes you want to lick the ice; not crunch on it but lick it.

What type of girl doesn't do a Cosmo? In a cocktail shaker filled with ice, mix 2 oz. vodka, 1 oz. Cointreau, 1oz. cranberry juice, juice from quarter wedge of lime and for kicks, I added a quick trickle of pomegranate juice. Carrie Bradshaw would be jealous of my Cosmo-making abilities.

There were some experimental drinks. Like the one with vodka, cranberry juice and chunks of pineapple. Had we had pineapple juice it would have been a Bay Breeze. Don't know if improvisation changes the name of the drink. It was a sort of vodka Sangria with little chunks of fruit to pick at when the drink was finished.

You might wonder why I picked the Russian Standard with the myriad of vodkas on the market. As I said, making cocktails is like making a good dish - it's all in the ingredients. Since the main ingredient in the cocktails was vodka, I wanted one that was smooth with none of the harshness that badly made vodka leaves in the mouth. And it had to mix well; you don't want your martini to taste like an actual olive. You only want the olive as an enhancer. The Russian Standard fit the bill with its four-times distillation and charcoal filtration.

Using cheap liquor in your cocktail is like thinking you're going to have rack of lamb but getting mutton instead. They are both sheep but they are not the same thing.