I love absolutely everything about the holidays, especially all of the delicious food and holiday drinks. Luckily, when we’re with our parents, they’re still in charge of all of the food, which means my husband and I are in charge of the drinks. Over the years, we’ve created lots of fun cocktails, and today, I’m sharing two of our favorite easy holiday drinks. We love bringing out our beautiful MacKenzie-Childs glasses for serving and styling during the holiday season so I’ll be sharing all of the details for our bar area too!
Our Holiday Bar Must-Haves
The MacKenzie-Childs Blooming and Tango Collections are perfect for entertaining. The Blooming Collection has the classic hand-painted checks that MacKenzie-Childs is known for, with the addition of gorgeous delicate gold floral detailing. We always get questions on where this glassware is from when we use it to serve our holiday drinks! For our setup, we have the wine glasses, champagne flutes, coupe glasses, and pitcher out on our serving table. I also filled the MacKenzie-Childs trifle bowl and highball glass with ornaments for a festive touch. I added in affordable bottlebrush trees and garland to complete the look.
Easy Holiday Drinks Number One: Winter Sangria
My husband and I read tons of winter sangria recipes before we started testing our own. Since it’s winter, we knew we wanted to use red wine and add some of our favorite fruits like apples and oranges. Cranberries were another must for me, but these are more for looks because I still don’t enjoy the taste of them! From there, we created a few batches until we had everything just right. Our winter sangria is now one of the holiday traditions that we make at Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s a super easy holiday drink and here’s the recipe:
Combine the following ingredients in a pitcher:
- 1 bottle of red wine (we like Grenache or Merlot, something on the sweeter side)
- 1 cup cranberries
- 6 cinnamon sticks
- 1 orange, sliced
- ½ cup orange juice
- 1 cup cranberry juice
- ½ cup Grand Marnier
- 1 green apple, sliced
- 1 cup grapes, sliced
- ½ cup blackberries
- 2 tablespoons sugar
Let the pitcher sit overnight (this step is really important!), and mix 2 cups of club soda in before serving.
Easy Holiday Drinks Number Two: Pomegranate French 75
A French 75 is one of my favorite classic cocktails. To add a fun twist to it for the holidays, I love to add pomegranate juice and pomegranate seeds. The juice makes the drink the perfect holiday color, and it also tastes delicious! The trick to making a good French 75 is to use very dry champagne. You don’t want anything that is too sweet! Here’s what you’ll combine to make it:
- 1 ounce of gin
- ½ ounce lemon juice (I like fresh!)
- 2 dashes of simple syrup
- 2 ounces of champagne
- 1-2 ounces of pomegranate juice to taste
- Sprinkle a few pomegranate seeds in the glass to complete
Depending on the size of the glass, you can double the recipe. The one you see in the photos is doubled! 🙂
Making our own easy holiday cocktails is such a fun tradition for us. We love seeing what we can create each year. I hope you enjoy these two drinks, and I can’t wait to share what we come up with next time! Thank you to MacKenzie-Childs for partnering with me on this post!
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