Holidays are a time for family, gift giving, and getting wasted off of your parents’ wine.  Over the holidays casual drinking is thrown out the window because wine just tastes better when it’s free.  The downside is that the only time your parents see you is when you’re plastered, so then they feel like they have to sit you down for an intervention the day before you’re supposed to catch a flight home.  For the next 3-6 months every phone call will end with a question about how many drinks you’ve had today, assuming you’ve already had 3.  For the first month and a half you just roll your eyes but one day you snap and sarcastically yell, “Yeah, I’ve had 4 beers, 3 shots of tequila, and I chased it with some rubbing alcohol.”  While you might have thought that you were getting your point across, your parents hang up the phone and promptly google ‘substance abuse centers Boston.”

There’s really no easy way around this.  Once your parents think you are a lush, it’s hard to do damage control; you won’t change their minds until you’ve sought professional help.  This means you need to take matters into your own hands.  If you’re going to score as much free booze as you can this holiday season, you’re going to have to coordinate a preemptive strike.  Here’s what to do:

Public Relations: Be your own PR director and get your family living in spin.  The next time your parents are on the phone, tell them about this magazine you’ve been reading called The Second Glass and how it’s the most informative source on wine you’ve ever seen.  Tell them it inspired you to go to a few wine tastings, some classes and that you are now an aficionado.  Litter your conversation with terms, traits, and names like bouquet, legs, Latour, Lafite, flabby, leather, black currant, and terroir.  Get really creative with French pronunciations so that they won’t be able to latch onto a single word you say.  Hopefully they will feel like everything has gone straight over their head and you are now in their eyes, the world’s foremost authority on wine.  This will set you up to be the “sommelier” for the evening.

Hitting the Streets: Hopefully all this talk has paid off and the day before the big dinner you parents ask you to come with them to the wine shop.  Since you are now the wine connoisseur they want you to pick the wine.  You pick out some pinot noir, some Chianti, some chardonnay, some beer, and most importantly, some port.

Kicking Them When They’re Down: In your role as sommelier, it is your duty to serve the wine.  Make sure your parents in particular are well saturated with it.  Take every opportunity possible to put a little more in their glasses.  If the wine or the tryptophan from the turkey doesn’t severely impair their judgment (or make them pass out at the table) the port (with about 20% alcohol) will.  The idea is to keep them one step ahead of you and at the end of the night, when your parents are long gone, guess who gets the leftover bottles, free and clear of scrutiny.

This might be morally reprehensible to some, but we’re not here to discuss ethics or philosophy.  Before your parents passed out, they were probably having a really good time.  I’d view this as nothing more than being a good host/server.