A few years ago, when Jason and I were trying to think of a fun theme for a holiday party, our friend Ethan told us of a longtime dream of his: to bust open a piñata full of tiny bottles of booze rather than candy. And how often, really, do you get to make someone’s dream come true? Realizing Ethan’s vision, however, put us up against a few obstacles.

The first was that the only bottles we could find that were plastic rather than glass contained vodka, and we worried that having only a single kind of alcohol would dampen the fun of the enterprise. We solved this by infusing the vodka with whole a range of ingredients (ginger, chili pepper, rosemary, etc) to give them more variety. It worked like a charm, because such a tiny amount of liquid infused very quickly. The second stumbling block was that a piñata full of bottles is very heavy indeed, and the poor thing strained and sagged under the weight so much that I was certain it was going to burst onto some unsuspecting partygoer’s head at any moment. Thankfully, it didn’t, though unleashing a piñata full of candy-colored booze on a roomful of people who’ve already been drinking for hours did its own kind of damage.

Though the piñata may have been a one-time only affair, some of the infusions were so good that we’ve made them many times since. Cinnamon is a personal favorite: a beautiful red color and, mixed with tonic, it tastes pleasantly like Big Red gum. Give it a try. This year I decided to experiment with a few other wintery flavors as well, and when I read a recent snippet in the Atlantic about someone making a cocktail syrup out of pine resin, I knew I had to try making a spruce-flavored vodka.

Pine boughs aren’t too hard to come by during this time of year, not even in the city, so we clipped off some pieces of twig and a little cluster of needles and sunk it in the vodka. It smelled like a Christmas tree in no time, and I was feeling pretty proud of myself and making plans to call the new concoction the Spruce Goose. Then my boss mentioned today that he thought certain pines might be poisonous. Yikes! I couldn’t find much evidence for this, especially in tiny quantities, but it does mean that I guess I’ll have to do some cautious experiments tonight before I give any Spruce Goose to anyone as a gift, and hope that that one guy on the Internet who insisted that pine resin is an emetic was wrong. It’s worth mentioning, I suppose that some evergreen trees are toxic to pets, but since we don’t typically give the cats alcohol (not even Oscar), I think we’ll be okay.