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The beloved December catchphrase “Merry Christmas” and the punch we serve at celebrations of the holiday have much in common. Both have early origins in 16th- and 17th-century England, and both were more recently popularized and immortalized in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
“ ‘Come in!’ exclaimed the Ghost. ‘Come in! and know me better, man!’ ” So goes the legendary invitation of the Ghost of Christmas Present to Ebenezer Scrooge, as the hospitable spirit sits surrounded by heaps of “turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.”
The bounties of Christmastime! But all that succulent food … and just one thing to drink?
The Dickensian holiday punch is very much still part of Christmas present. Invariably, it is around the holidays that this one-bowl wonder rears its stodgy head at dinner parties, cocktail gatherings, and even boozy brunches. While it would be Scrooge-like of me to rail against the popularity of “Merry Christmas,” surely today’s guests deserve more than a monotone, hangover-prone bowl of punch.
I’ll admit, Christmas and punch have a storied history together. In his authoritative book on the drink, Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl, cocktail historian David Wondrich traces the concoction’s roots from India to the modern cocktail movement. It was somewhere in the British milieu of India that citrus, sugar, spices, water, and arrack (a South Asian spirit made from palm sap) were first combined and called “punch.” The earliest reference to the drink dates to a 1638 letter from the city of Surat, but, rather than being a truly Indian drink, the recipe seems to have evolved from the early modern mingling of cultures that occurred on ships sailing between distant ports. Popularly, etymologists have even pointed to the Hindi number five (पाँच, pronounced paanch) as the origin of the name punch, accounting for the five core ingredients of the recipe, though Wondrich has questioned this theory.
The seafaring British carried punch wherever they sailed (and unfortunately, they sailed everywhere). When the recipe reached England, it was made with brandy, when it arrived on North American shores, rum was used. It was this culture of mixing locally available spirits with sweet, sour, and spicy ingredients, in fact, that laid the groundwork for the eventual birth of the cocktail. Punch was an influential potable prototype.
We find the intersection of the maritime history of punch and its festive association with Christmas as early as 1694, when First Lord of the Admiralty (head of the then English Navy) Edward Russell threw a lavish Christmas party in Spain. Russell, striving to set some sort of record for debauchery on the holiday, put together what is arguably the most extravagant punch ever served. But he skipped the bowl. Instead, he employed an entire fountain, garnished with an actual rowboat that churned the punch with its oars. Though we can assume some level of exaggeration, the punch reportedly contained 200 gallons of brandy, 12 thousand lemons, a barrel of wine, bales of sugar, shavings of nutmeg, lime juice, and more. Such an inebriating fountain is rivaled only by the storied alcoholic horse milk fountain William of Rubruck described in the Mongol capital of Möngke Khan in the 13th century.
It’s no wonder that the tradition of Christmas punch made its way into the bountiful haunts of the Ghost of Christmas Present. Dickens must have sensed that the British were still drunk from the excesses of Admiral Russell’s fountain some 150 years later. And he wrote at a particularly formative time for Anglo-Saxon Christmas tradition—shaping much of it himself. The Christmas tree, for example, was only just becoming popular in England in the 1840s. In some ways, the Christmas punch is the older of the two traditions.
Thanks to all of this history, I concede that it is sensible that many households still find themselves a ladle away from a glass of punch each December. In Mexico, too, Christmas punch, or ponche Navideño, is a yearly homemade staple brewed from rum, raw piloncillo sugar, cinnamon, and a variety of fruits like native hawthorns, guavas, pears, apples, tamarind, and hibiscus flowers. So I won’t discourage anyone from mixing up grandma’s boozy recipe this winter. But ancestral respect aside, is this 400-year-old beverage still the best option for our seasonal celebrations?
In the preface to his punch book, Wondrich disparages modern party punches as “light, colorful things that are all fizz and fruit and are far too eager to please to be taken seriously as a delivery system for beverage alcohol.” The mass-market soda, OJ, bubbly, and vodka combo might get the party started, but the morning after will surely sour one’s opinion of the host. He wrote a whole book on punch … maybe we should take the criticism to heart.
A disclaimer: I fondly recall the mocktailesque witches’ brew of my childhood Halloween. A black, plastic cauldron of Sprite, fruit punch, and dissipating orange-and-green icebergs of sherbet. It’s enough to delight even the most discerning 12-year-old’s palate. This soda punch was the sugar high to a children’s party that a stiff rum punch aims to be at an adult affair. But when I show up to a holiday party and find a glass bowl of a mystery liquid, I often find that the juice has not evolved much past the confectionary brew of my youth. Where many hosts go to lengths to curate a sophisticated evening by sending bespoke invitations, tablescaping with seasonal flowers and produce, and cuing up the perfect playlist, a bowl of punch can immediately cheapen the soirée vibe to that of a prepubescent pizza party.
The modern world of entertaining—in both the commercial catering business and the private dining table space—has increasingly required that a diversity of dietary restrictions be accounted for. From halal to vegan, allergies to intolerances, the menu has never been more burdened by the idiosyncrasies of the eaters. So why, when it comes to the beverage we serve, would we whip up a catch-all drink?
Christina Cauterucci
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Modern drinkers are equally needy. The gluten-sensitive need alternatives to beer. The sober-curious need sophisticated nonalcoholic options. The calorie-watchers eschew all things sugar. “One big bowl!” hardly seems the rallying cry around which this motley crew of drinkers will unite.
Christmas presents us with so many opportunities to play with seasonal flavors, to layer the moody tones of winter with the warm notes of the holiday spirit. Despite its legacy, the punch bowl is antithetical to the diversity of flavors we should offer our guests A past era may have called for a single boozy basin out of lack of alternatives, but we are clearly not short on options. If we want our guests to come in and know us better (man!), we’d best ply them with excellent libations, and a thoughtfully curated assortment at that.
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How so? We might defrost our guests as they shake the snow from their boots with a steeping mug of mulled wine (this doubles as a cozy aroma far more inviting than anything from Yankee Candle). We can even invite a touch of cold inside with a maple ice cream affogato. We can spice up an old fashioned with rosemary and cranberries. We can call on tradition with a glass of homemade eggnog. We can reference punch’s origins with a cozy cup of masala chai. We can ruminate on the fruits of winter with an after-dinner tasting of ice wine.
The monolithic bowl that sits on the island. The ladle used only for soup, except today. The chunk of ice slowly spinning as it melts unevenly. These are the cautionary visions shown to us by the Ghost of Christmas Past. Hospitality is an ever-changing art, a dance that requires the utmost nimbleness of the striving host. Tradition is a handy crutch to lean on, but our thirst has clearly outgrown a one-item beverage menu.
Who still has a punch bowl lying around, anyway?
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