A fun thing that happened over the winter holidays is that my husband and I celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary. Seven years! Seems like nothing compared to the FIFTEEN years we’ve been together, but fun nonetheless. And we hired a sitter and went out to dinner, to a place we’d never tried, and the evening was warm so we went to a nearby town that has a quaint little main street, and we got ice cream and walked up and down the sidewalks and went into a bookstore (and got glared at for still holding our – empty – ice cream containers). It was lovely. I wore stockings with polka dots, which was A Big Fashion Risk for me, so that felt bold and daring, and it’s always lovely to have a leisurely evening with one’s beloved, with good food and ice cream to boot.

To celebrate, my in-laws got us a present! It was a lovely surprise, because they don’t normally get us presents… (Or do they? Now I am re-thinking that statement. They got us a huge, beautiful wooden cutting board last year, and I have some vague recollection that six years is wood… we haven’t even USED the cutting board because it is too beautiful and because I don’t know how to clean it properly SIGH) Anyway, they got us a set of those adorable copper Moscow Mule mugs you see at restaurants, because the seventh anniversary is supposedly the copper anniversary.

It was very unexpected and something we would never buy for ourselves, so it was really fun. And I went right out and bought vodka and ginger beer and limes and something else that goes into a Moscow Mule and we had Moscow Mules that very evening. Quite delicious, despite the fact that I do NOT like vodka.

Apparently you can make something called a Dark and Stormy that is quite similar, but involves rum instead of vodka. But I like rum even less, so we did not try that one.

I would love to try something similar with gin, which is my liquor of choice, but all the recipes I found just sounded… suspicious. I canNOT imagine gin pairing well with ginger beer. And drinking gin and tonic in a copper mug just… didn’t feel right. (Perhaps I am overthinking this.)

But after that, I really didn’t have occasion to try any more fancy cocktails. My husband isn’t really an alcohol drinker, and I’m much more of a wine person. And I just couldn’t muster the enthusiasm needed for making a fancy cocktail on a weeknight.

But those adorable glasses were just sitting there, unused!

So I bought some grapefruit juice and some more limes and some club soda, and I concocted a mocktail with those ingredients. And once the club soda ran out, I used grapefruit LaCroix instead (which I’d purchased… oh… a year or so ago, when it seemed like LaCroix was all the rage and it turned out I am not a fan). And the copper mugs keep the drinks very cold and make them seem MUCH more frivolous than juice and soda might normally seem.