So I’m home for the holidays too, but unlike my esteemed colleague Matt Davis, getting home involved not a 20-hour flight but a 20-minute ride in the back of my mom’s minivan (to a particularly noxious suburb which, since my last visit, has somehow managed to cram yet ANOTHER outdoor shopping center into its already overstuffed boundaries).

My parents understand that nothing facilitates a happy holiday like a well stocked liquor cabinet—they’re out of olives, though, so I’ve been improvising a dirty martini with pickle juice instead.* It’s not quite as gross as it sounds—the cocktail is a delicate shade of green, with the brininess of the juice offsetting the gin like olives would. It’s only a tiny bit pickley.

There’s nothing like holidays with the fam to bring out the drug-fiending part of my lizard brain that’s been otherwise dormant since I moved out of my parents’ house (improvisations then included apples, dryer sheets, and—in an fit of stoner ingenuity that seemed cool at the time but in retrospect is painfully dorky—the trombone I played in high school band). I’ll shake off these alcoholic tendencies in the new year, but for now, I literally cannot imagine making it through the holidays with my family without a buzz on—and I like my family.

If anyone else has any depraved holiday moments—or necessity-bred cocktail innovations—they would like to share, I think now would be a great time.

*Wikipedia informs me that this variation is called a Fiendtini, which does not in any way make me feel better about drinking it.