Having largely written off this holiday season (to try to do anything in 2020 is pure madness) I find myself in the happy predicament of finding any little brush with joy a bonus. Such was not the case with this try at a holiday mocktail. I’m still overestimating what my memory holds, so I thought I could casually put together something akin to this drink, but I failed to consult that post or the recipe itself, and so ended up with a bland and yet-still-nasty concoction that neglected the use of blood oranges, and substituted the seltzer with a fruit soda that was not quite right, making it both too tart and somehow finishing with an element of sickly sweetness.
The lesson being that this is not the time nor year to mess around with classics, no matter what sort of semi-successful motions I might have made with the jello salad. For every innocuous switch, there is a change that alters and ruins whatever magical alchemy exists in a balanced group of ingredients. Stray but a little…
For this pretty mocktail, the old ‘look-but-please-don’t-drink-me’ adage holds true. Typical of 2020, when so little substance hides behind such monumental piles of shit. That’s ok. Maybe we have learned a few things, gotten better at life by looking a little deeper at ourselves, our flaws and faults, our blindness to our biases, our genuine efforts at being better people. A closer examination of things is often uncomfortable, but always leads to improvement, or at least awareness. That’s the beginning. And so I continue the holiday season by raising this mess of a mocktail and asking you to toast to the start and continuation of something wonderful. Something better.
