Please Tell Me the Best Thanksgiving Cocktail

Because I live 3,000 miles from any of my blood relations, Thanksgiving is usually relegated to the land of Bender Holidays (joined by its compatriots New Years Eve, Halloween, Labor Day and National Muffin Day). But now that I am old and my liver looks like a sea cucumber that got caught in a boat propellor, I’ve been forced to take things down a few notches. These days, my friends and I are more likely to cook a dignified meal and get drunk like adults, which is to say, on nice wines and cocktails that aren’t just a plastic bottle of hooch pulled out of Tammy’s glovebox outside the Wawa.

The problem is, what are the good Thanksgiving cocktails? Cider and mulled wine, certainly, but anything hot requires you to prepare it in the kitchen, and the kitchen is where the Real Chefs are doing their work, screaming and bludgeoning the turkey and wiping its blood from the ceiling. I don’t want to go in there.

Breakfast cocktails (Bloody Marys, mimosas, bellinis) are also good, but that’s only if you’re showing up early, since people get really riled up if they see you with a tomato-based drink after dark and no one wants to be the person who induces a Thanksgiving heart attack.

Where does that leave us? Wine? A bottle of Courvoisier wrapped in a gift bow? A bottle of Cointreau baked into cake? What the fuck am I supposed to bring to this shit? Should I just stay home?