Welcome to the December Register – the one edition where we permit ourselves to be drenched in tinsel, velvet, and the faint whiff of existential dread. While the rest of the world is busy pretending that matching family pyjamas constitute a personality, we’ve been quietly arming you with proper ammunition: velvet jackets and silk coats sharp enough to slice turkey. This month, refresh your memory (and wardrobe) with our seasonal style dispatches to ensure you win Christmas and put everyone else to shame. It's not a competition of course... but it is actually. Should you still need to buy forgiveness in gift form, our annual Gift Guide is positively bloated with things that won’t end up in next year’s charity shop. After that, retreat to the library with our Christmas Book Club: five festive tales guaranteed to make you feel better about your own family. Finally, queue up Crooners’ Christmas – the only playlist that understands “silent night” is a threat, not a promise.
All that's left is to pour something strong (that'll be a Corpse Reviver #2, down below...) which we'll come to shortly, mute the group chat, and let us guide you through Christmas. Yuletide awaits – try not to cock it up.
Christmas Style
For reasons that defy sanity, many people equate 'Christmas' and 'dressing up' with an excuse to plunder the style gutter, dredging up clobber such as the offensive Christmas jumper replete with childish reindeer jacquard. Gracefully sidestep the tat and give your Christmas events, no matter how informal, a touch of class and elegance with our stunning Autumn/Winter collection. We've created a menswear and womenswear guide to festive dressing that champion our velvet garments, plus a couple's guide to hosting a Christmas or New Year bash that everyone will remember.
Xmas Gift Guide
Ladies, you have no doubt already bought gifts, wrapped them, attached bows, and written thoughtful messages in cards, so this section is most likely for the males among us who have managed to tick off not a single Christmas gifting box. Help is at hand, courtesy of our expertly curated Xmas gift guide, which boasts a wealth of festive gifts both large and small, ideally suited to the most stylish people in your life. From sartorial stocking fillers to sophisticated grand gestures, our gift guide puts Saint Nick's efforts to shame.
The Christmas Book Club: Yule Love These (sorry)
A Christmas Memory – Truman Capote
In the Depression-era South, a delicate seven-year-old boy and his elderly, childlike cousin spend November forging illicit fruitcakes soaked in bootleg whiskey. They fly kites, murder flies for pocket money, and queue for charity dolls, all while knowing this is their final Christmas together. Capote’s prose drips with Proustian syrup, but the wry sting is that innocence always loses; one will die, the other will become Truman Capote. Merry bloody Christmas.
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Four penniless New England sisters - tomboy author, doomed pianist, vapid beauty, and the insufferably virtuous Amy - endure Civil War austerity under the iron rule of 'Marmee', a woman whose moral superiority makes Greta Thunberg look like a model of restraint by comparison. Jo rejects laundry and Laurie’s proposal with equal ferocity; Beth contracts scarlet fever and saintly expiration; Meg marries poverty’s upgrade. Alcott smuggles transcendental feminism into a stocking stuffer, proving that girls can be heroic, provided they eventually shut up and settle down. Seasonal saccharine with a puritanical bite.
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Ebenezer Scrooge, a human calculator in a nightcap, loathes Christmas because it interferes with compound interest. Three - essentially supernatural debt collectors - drag him through time-lapse therapy: past poverty, present Tiny Tim’s inevitable demise, future grave with no attendees. Dickens, ever the social-justice showman, terrifies the bourgeoisie into flinging shillings at the deserving poor, ensuring “God bless us, every one” will be weaponised for the next two centuries.
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle – Arthur Conan Doyle
A priceless gem vanishes from a hotel, only to resurface in the gullet of a Christmas goose destined for a plumber’s table. Sherlock Holmes, high on cocaine and superiority, traces the bird through London’s frozen gutters while Watson trots behind like a Labrador with a medical degree. The culprit is a penitent hotel attendant who merely wanted to pay off gambling debts. Holmes, in a rare spasm of Yuletide mercy, lets him go, proving even the great detective occasionally mistakes sentimentality for justice. A cracking read nonetheless!
Crooners’ Christmas - The Ultimate Christmas Playlist
We tooth-combed Spotify so you don't have to! Music, the magnet that draws people together, but when it comes to families forced to spend a booze-fuelled five days cooped up under the same roof, music turns into the great antagonist. Generational conflict has never been so intense when fought under the hum of personal music choices, so do everyone a favour and play these Christmas playlists - classy crooners and impeccable background jazz that we can all get on with.
The Only Christmas Cocktail
Snowballs are for melts. If you want to give Santa a surprise this year, leave him half a dozen After Eights and a Corpse Reviver #2. Born from the roaring excesses of the Prohibition era, this potent sharpener emerged as a cheeky antidote to the morning-after malaise. The "corpse reviver" moniker dates back to 1861, when London's Punch magazine dubbed strong spirits a "hair-of-the-dog" cure. By 1871, early recipes swirled brandy with maraschino and bitters, but it was Harry Craddock, the Yankee exile who ruled the Savoy Hotel's American Bar from 1920, who created the version we know today.
In his 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, Craddock unleashed a duo of revivers, with #2 stealing the spotlight: equal parts London dry gin, Lillet Blanc (or a Cocchi Americano proxy), fresh lemon juice, and a rinse of absinthe, shaken into frothy immortality. "Four of these taken in quick succession will unrevive the corpse again," he quipped. Post-Prohibition, the Corpse Reviver #2 faded into obscurity amid highballs and martinis, only to claw back some popularity in the craft cocktail renaissance. The revival of Cocchi Americano supplied some tailwinds too. It's a Christmas drink in the same vein that Die Hard is a Christmas film, but just as Los Angeles leans on the bravery of Detective John McClane, so you will lean on the Corpse Reviver. And lean until you fall over.
Method (Serves 1):
Rinse a chilled coupe with 1/4 tsp absinthe; discard excess. Add 3/4 oz each London dry gin, Lillet Blanc, and fresh lemon juice to a shaker with ice. Shake vigorously until frosted (10-15 seconds). Double-strain into the glass. Garnish with a lemon twist. One is responsible. Two is greasing the wheels of merriment. Three is greasing the stairs.
