Gift Of The Day: Cocktail Advent Calendar From Meliora Forever
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If you know someone who enjoys a cocktail every day, here’s a fun gift that may expand his or her horizons: Meliora Forever’s 12 Days Of Christmas Calendar. Meliora Forever makes Instant Cocktail Cubes. Year-round, fans typically buy sleeves of cubes. Toss two tiny cubes in a glass with two shots of liquor and voilà: You’ve made yourself an artisan cocktail in a minute. For Christmas, how about an advent calendar, where behind every door is your cocktail surprise of the day. For the 12 Days Of Christmas, there are Advent calendars. For 12 days, pop open the door to get the cubes for the day’s cocktail (photo #3). The right people will be thrilled with this memorable gift. There are are two versions that make whiskey-, vodka-, or Champagne-based cocktails. The artisan cubes are hand-made in small batches in Buffalo, New York, using the finest bitters, extracts, and other ingredients. It’s a gift that keeps on giving for 12 days! Check out the 12 Days Of Christmas, below. > The different types of whiskey. > The year’s 49 cocktail holidays. > The year’s 25+ whiskey holidays. > Head to MeloriaForever.com. All 12 flavors in this Christmas Advent Calendar box are unique formulations—holiday cocktail creations that no one will have tasted before. Meliora is the neuter plural form of the Latin adjective melior, which can mean better things, always better, ever better, or for the pursuit of the better. The company founder, Jessica Stephens, chose the name because “It is a great reminder to learn better, do better, and be better.” She spends endless hours testing and re-testing each item until she’s sure that it’s absolutely correct. (Her background is in environmental science and chemistry.) Meliora Forever was a pandemic project that began when she created an Instant Cocktail Sugar Cubes for the Old Fashioned, “a drink that was screaming out for this idea to come to life,” she said. So she developed a convenient sugar cube with bitters and fruits so that all you have to do is muddle it in your favorite whiskey. You can learn something new every day, and today, writing this article, we learned that we were thinking about the 12 Days of Christmas all wrong. We’ve been singing the song since childhood, and always thought that it referred to the 12 days leading up to, and culminating in, Christmas. In other words, December 14th would be Day 1 of gifting. All these years we thought that You’d start on December 14th and give gifts daily through December 25th, Christmas Day being the 12th and final gift. Oh, so misguided were we, all these years! The traditional 12 Days of Christmas actually runs from Christmas Day, December 25th, through January 5th. That’s tje Twelfth Night/Epiphany Eve. Yes, a revelation: The 12 days begin on Christmas Day, not before. The article continues below the photo. |
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 [8] Year-round, Meliora Forever sells its cocktail cubes in sleeves. There are cubes for everyone’s favorite spirit: Champagne, gin, rum, tequila, vodka, and whiskey. Here, a Lemon Drop Cocktail. Now, a reprieve: Many people these days do give 12 Days of Christmas gifts as an Advent-style countdown, starting December 14th and ending on Christmas Day. Even though that’s not the traditional meaning of the song. So, why do the 12 Days start with Christmas? The timing reflects the structure of the traditional Christian liturgical calendar: Christmas as the beginning, not the end. In the Christian tradition, Christmas Day isn’t the culmination of the celebration, it’s the start of it. December 25th marks the birth of Jesus, and the Church celebrates that momentous event for 12 full days afterward. (It’s like how you might celebrate a major life event—a wedding, a birth—for more than just one day.) They lead to Epiphany, January 6th, which commemorates the visit of the Three Wise Men/Magi. In the Christian calendar, this is hugely significant: It represents Jesus being revealed to the Gentiles (non-Jews), symbolizing the universal nature of Christianity. Shakespeare’s play “Twelfth Night” refers to the evening of January 5th (the 12th night after Christmas), which was traditionally the biggest party of the Christmas season. After that is when you’d finally take down the holiday decorations. In modern secular culture, we’ve basically flipped the script. We build up to Christmas with decorations,shopping, parties, and other festivities, then everything stops on December 26th. And the traditional observance is very much alive in many parts of the world, particularly in Latin America, the U.K. Commonwealth, the Philippines, and so on. We stand enlightened.
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