What's Your December Drink? 🗣🍷

A call for YOUR holiday drinks. 🥃 An in-person literary event on December 11 in Brooklyn. ✍️ Funny toasts from around the world.🥂 A Venetian origin story.

This is where we want to hear from you!

What’s your holiday drink? We’re looking for holiday drinking traditions for an upcoming spotlight. These can be drinks from your home culture or the home you’ve built, from NYC and beyond.

This idea started fermenting after a social post by Michele. Responses so far include eggnog daiquiris in Louisiana, coquito tours in East Harlem, and good old hot buttered rum.

This reminds me that I got my bartending start in the Upper Midwest. When the tinsel came out, the Brandy Old Fashioneds were set aside while we mixed up Tom and Jerry batter (yes, batter!).

Doesn’t need to be buttery, alcoholic, or even homemade: what are you drinking this time of year? Simply reply to this email to contribute.

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Funny Toasts from Around the World

You may have listened to the trailer for the third season of the Modo di Bere podcast, but it’s also watchable—which turns out to be important for visualizing the kinetic toasts this episode describes. Think playground rhymes and patty-cake, but with grown-up drinks.

6 minutes and two seconds of adorable drinks and language content, featuring toasting rituals from Padua, Calabria, France, Spain and Taiwan.

Rose Thomas Featured at a Literary Event in Park Slope

I’m a singer-songwriter with a poetry degree. When I pursued my first sommelier certification, I thought wine sounded like a fantastic day job to fund my creative pursuits. I also expected wine to be a good living. I tried out different career tracks in the beverage industry—I jumped into wine from mixology—and the intellectual and social nature of the business kept me going for over a decade.

Mid-pandemic, I was at a wine crossroads. I hadn’t found the paycheck I’d imagined would accompany my new array of skills, which included multiple certifications and speaking Italian. Moreover, I’d wanted to be a writer since I was four years old. It turned out that I hadn’t changed.

I was considering walking away from my wine career, until a sudden trip to Veneto made me remember how much I love Italy, Italian language and Italian wine. I opened my mind to inspiration, got the idea for Modo di Bere, and realized that I didn’t have to choose.

For more of that story, you can listen to Season 2, Episode 12 of the Modo di Bere Podcast, an essay I call Venice Spritz Magic. 

To hear me read some of my work that has never been published before, you can come in person on

Wednesday, December 11,
Young Ethel’s Bar
506 5th Avenue, Brooklyn
6 pm sharp

The other readers—and one singer—are members of my writers’ collective.

Let me know if you can make it!

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The “speak” 🗣️ and “wine” 🍷 emojis are in the subject for easy searching.