It’s not the first time I wished I lived in a grand English Country House—or at least a few rooms that looked like one. The Colefax & Fowler book came out in the 1980s, just before I bought my first ever apartment in New York, and I was obsessed with Nancy Lancaster’s famous “buttah yellow” room (Lancaster, although a Virginian, worked with John Fowler to create the firm’s signature English style). My own living room had much the same dimensions (but unlike Nancy’s pad, it was pretty much the whole apartment) and I was determined to replicate those glazed yellow walls. I held lemons and butter up to the walls in search of the perfect shade; I bought Jocasta Innes’s “Paint Magic” and learned to mix burnt umber and sienna and the all-important black into a glaze. I have to say, my moonlighting Irish painter and I came pretty close. I was even lucky enough to inherit some Downtonesque furniture after we’d finished: a pair of Adam consoles, a Chinese Chippendale sofa, an enormous portrait of a cricket player. But as lovely as those items were—and as grateful as I was for them—the thing I could never exactly replicate was the Lancaster room’s great charm and seemingly incongruous livability.

Part of it, like the interiors at Downton, is the mix. Slipcovered armchairs and skirted tables share space with far finer pieces. Renaissance portraits are in the same room as rush baskets for logs. It remains one of the finest rooms I’ve ever seen, but it was clearly meant for hanging about in. Those upholstered chairs are slapped right next to each other (in an almost awkward way we would never dream of doing) near the fire. There’s a desk that’s obviously something good, but you can tell that someone actually uses it. Lancaster must have had some kind of strong British DNA, because the rest of us Americans are not nearly as natural when it comes to creating environments of such effortless and down-to-earth grandeur.

This was a lesson brought home to me when my English friend Sarah Giles bought the apartment two floors above me just after I moved in. Her living room had the same dimensions as mine and she covered its walls with a creamy Colefax stripe; her curtains were trimmed in a longish fringe (I was so terrified of screwing up such a pricey investment, I lived with simple silk shades for years before I bit the bullet). She pulled off seemingly daring mixes of fabrics like Colefax’s Bowood glazed chintz in blue and red with no less than two Bennison linen prints. Oriental paintings and English prints covered the walls, a fire surround was covered in an old Kilim. On coffee tables and ottomans and garden seats, there were stacks and stacks of books and all manner of artifacts from her trips to India and Vietnam and Thailand. She’d artfully arrange decorative postcards and invitations on her mantel, and when I did the same, it came out looking like a mess. Even her bathroom was to die for—it had faux-bois paneling and Czech & Speake period fittings long before Waterworks copied them.

I had never heard of faux bois. I had barely heard of Bennison. I did know about about Colefax—mainly because I’d spent more money than ever before in my life on curtains and a dressing table skirt in their Roses and Pansies chintz in a previous apartment. As great as they were on their own, they never looked right in the setting I’d tried to create. Sarah’s setting, on the other hand, was perfect. It was riotous and interesting and somehow extremely tasteful all at the same time, and most important it was comfortable. I loved my own apartment and miss it to this day, but truth be told, I spent a lot more time at Sarah’s, sprawling on her deep George Smith sofa, drinking wine, gossiping, ordering in sushi and Chinese, than I did at home.

This is the English gift.  Of course, Van Dykes (like the one in the Downton dining room) and piles and piles of things like my very favorite Chinese export porcelain don’t hurt. They’ve also had a few hundred more years of practice in regard to living well and messing around with all that good stuff.  But we’re catching up. Decorators like Bunny Williams and Suzanne Rheinstein, Miles Redd and Jeffrey Bilhuber are genius at translating and updating the philosophy behind the look on this side of the pond. And then of course, there’s everyone’s favorite show that serves as our current touchstone for the way we’d all secretly like to live.

But the subject today is men and gin, preferably in the form of a martini. Few things make a man more elegant than having one in hand. A case in point: the Slim Aarons photograph of Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gary Cooper, and Jimmy Stewart at Romanoff’s on New Year’s Eve 1957. They are all in white tie, they are all cracking up, they all exude a masculinity and a coolness that is utterly breathtaking. Gary Cooper is holding what looks like a straight-up martini. It may well have been champagne, but I’m sticking with gin. Anyway, all four of those guys spent a lot of time in Chasen’s, the much lamented Hollywood landmark that closed in 1995.

Chasen’s was famous for its chili (Liz Taylor had several quarts flown to the set of “Cleopatra”) and a martini called “Pepe’s Flame of Love.” Created by Chasen’s bartender Pepe Ruiz, it was made with Stolichnaya vodka, sherry instead of vermouth, and orange peel rather than lemon. It was allegedly made for Dean Martin, another extra cool fellow, after he complained that he was bored with regular martinis. I can attest that it is excellent.

In today’s Fetch Bar column, our intrepid correspondent Brooks Reitz writes of the perfection that is on offer from the Connaught Hotel’s martini cart. I agree with Brooks that some of the finest martinis in the world are made in London hotel bars—usually by Italian bartenders. I am partial to the bar at Duke’s, where bar manager Alessandro Palazzi starts with a frozen glass and garnishes the finished product with either the peel of an Amalfi lemon or olives from Puglia. James Bond creator Ian Fleming drank at Duke’s—he is said to have written part of “Casino Royale” there. But you should ignore the awful Fleming 89, made with vodka infused with Tonka beans and chocolate bitters, in favor of Bond’s own favorite, a martini he named the Vesper after the novel’s gorgeous female lead, Vesper Lynd.

The Vesper is served—according to Bond’s instructions to the bar man in Casino Royale—“in a deep champagne goblet” (which means that my boy Gary Cooper could indeed have been drinking one), and is made with “three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet.” It is then shaken “very well until it’s ice-cold” and garnished with a “large thin slice of lemon peel.”

My father is partial to Gordon’s, but in a plain old fairly wet martini garnished with an onion, which technically makes it a Gibson. He is also partial to other martini drinkers. So it was that when he spied Bill Blass in the bar at the Jockey Club in Washington, D.C. with a straight-up martini happily in hand, he introduced himself and they became fast friends. On the face of it, they were an unlikely pair: a world-famous dress designer and a businessman and politico from the Mississippi Delta. But Blass was at least as cool as Gary Cooper and Clarke Reed could easily have held his own with that bunch at Romanoff’s. Because they both knew/know how to hold their gin, in every sense of the word.

Rogers, born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, came to Manhattan in the 1950s and started his own ad agency in 1974.  In the next three decades he created some of the most memorable slogans of the century: “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good” (for Vidal Sassoon); “Danskins are not just for dancing;” “Demanded by and created by perfectionists” (for Baccarat). He did ads for Arnold Scaasi (“Me and my Scaasi…”) and for his friend and Connecticut neighbor Bill Blass. But his most famous campaign remains “What becomes a legend most?”

That tagline was for ads that included pretty much every female legend on the planet swathed in nothing but Blackglama mink. Among the women delighted to pose were Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford (a good friend Peter always referred to as simply “Crawford”), Claudette Colbert (another close friend) Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich, Lauren Bacall, Eartha Kitt, Lillian Hellman, Diana Ross. The list goes on and on.

These days I am thrilled to report that Peter has moved back South, to a divine house in the French Quarter of New Orleans, which means that I am spoiled by his proximity. He is the most generous guest in the world, toting over a case of some wonderful wine every time he’s asked for dinner and reciprocating with relaxed suppers featuring his justifiably famous chili or a Brazilian feast cooked up by his right-hand woman Rosa. He is also a fabulous portrait painter, a great patron of good causes (I’m happy to say his latest is the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, where I’m board chair), and the world’s most loyal friend.

I love going to Peter’s house because it is so beautiful and light-filled—but also because I can ogle all the Blackglama portraits for the fiftieth time. The originals are in the Smithsonian and they deserve to be—they transport the viewer to a lost age of genuine glamour. Those legendary women might have been happy to wrap themselves up in a luxurious fur (part of the deal was they got to keep it), but the last thing they needed was a stamp of approval in the form of anyone else’s initials.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. Recently my family had some bad news, and I got some really thoughtful emails (which I will print out and keep), but also dozens of beautifully handwritten notes on a range of stationery that said a lot about each sender.

It’s not directly related, I know, but during this past holiday season, book sales in actual bookstores increased by substantial margins over the year before. Readers are realizing it’s important to support independent bookstores (like Taigan’s beloved Books & Books in Coral Gables, for example, or Heirloom Books in Charleston). There was a huge backlash when Amazon encouraged shoppers to use its dastardly price-check app (which allows shoppers in physical stores to see, by scanning a bar code, if they can get a better price online) to earn a 5 percent credit on Amazon purchases. Writer Andre Dubus said he saw the move as blatant attempt to monopolize the market, the effect of which would ultimately be to “further devalue, as a cultural and human necessity, the book itself.”

I think it’s good news that we suddenly seem to be craving the personal and tangible, whether it’s a book or a letter or even an anchorman. Last year, for the first time since 2002, the ratings of the Big Three nightly newscasts went up. Apparently, we want getting our information to be personal again too, not to mention reliable. Uncle Walter may be dead, but we’ll happily take Brian, Diane, or Scott over a collection of blogs or twitter feeds disseminated by God knows who, or a stable of incessant cable chatterers with no real portfolio.

If we are finally getting tired of the fragmented and the ephemeral, there is no place better to start than by writing a letter (and in this week’s Fetch, there are some swell accoutrements to help you do it). Can you imagine The Box Tops singing, “My baby, she wrote me an email?” Or worse, a tweet? No. Every once in a while at least, we want our babies, and our friends, to write us a letter. So get to it.

I’ve made all those and more again, naturally, but I also saw a Huffington Post piece on the resolutions of celebrities and they were a lot more fun, if not utterly inane. Some person named Neon Hitch resolves to “stay positive and don’t doubt yourself”; sweet Abigail Breslin is going to stop saying “um.” Ashton Kutcher actually tweeted that he wanted everyone to “agree to a resolution to feel one another’s pain and joy and create the peace we desire through proactive generosity.” Just before I thought I might throw up, I came upon Olivia Wilde, who vows to “try to read more novels.”

In addition to being a beautiful and talented actress (late of “House,” among other things), Olivia is the daughter of my friends the talented and intrepid journalists Leslie and Andrew Cockburn. Her two uncles are exceptional journalists too and Christopher Hitchens was a regular childhood dinner guest—she knows plenty about reading. So do I. I know that I haven’t been doing nearly enough of it lately, especially for pleasure, so I decided to make like Olivia—and the late and much-missed Hitchens too, for that matter—and title my own resolution list, “Madder Music and Stronger Wine.”

The line, one that Hitchens and the Cockburns would be well familiar with, comes from a poem by Ernest Dowson, one of the major poets of late Victorian decadent period. For my purposes we will lump books in with the music, and my not-so-mad vow is to pick up a book every time I am tempted to punch the On Demand button on my TV clicker or play with my iPad on a plane. To that end, I have by my bedside, Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table, and I’ve already finished Laura Lippman’s deeply affecting The Most Dangerous Thing. Laura, who is married to Treme producer David Simon, is a part-time neighbor of mine in New Orleans and a much-lauded mystery writer who grew up in Baltimore. This book is set in her hometown too, but it transcends the mystery genre and is so good I may have to read it again.

As for the music, I have vowed to create a new playlist of tunes, madder and otherwise, at least once every week. Being deprived of music is as bad for the spirit as being deprived of great fiction. And there’s so much great stuff out there. Also on the celeb resolution list was Maroon 5 lead singer Adam Levine, who said he resolved to start smoking, communicate, and kill his own food. That was a funny enough that I decided to download some Maroon 5, a band with whom I was only glancingly familiar, and now I can’t stop listening to “If I Ain’t Got You” and “Out of Goodbyes” with Lady Antebellum, another band I’m suddenly turned onto.

Next I’m going to buy an old fashioned receiver, hook up the turntable I bought five years ago and listen to all my treasured LPs. While I do that I’ll pay close attention of the always spot-on advice of my buddy Jay McInerney, whose wine column for the Wall Street Journal last weekend was full of his own resolutions for the Wall Street Journal. Among the wines I’ll be sipping as I spin my ancient vinyl will be a Chenin Blanc, which he calls “one of the world’s least appreciated wines. He adds that, “If I experience a personal financial crisis, I will change this resolution to: drink more Muscadet. Another Loire white, Muscadet is the best white wine value in the world.”

Jay and I will also be drinking more Reisling, especially those from Austria, not only because it’s “one of the food-friendliest wines in the world,” but “every wine merchant and sommelier you encounter will think you’re cool if you ask for it.” I like cool. I also like Champagne, a lot, so I’m on board with Jay’s resolution to drink more grower Champagne in 2012. Grower Champagne is made by farmers who used to sell their grapes to the giant Champagne houses and are now vinifying their own. Two of those growers are the brothers Pierre and Philippe Aubry, and Eli Hardof sells their product on Taigan’s A Wine for All. Tart, dry, and made of an unusual blend of grapes, it goes really well with a wide variety of foods. It is also an incredible wine at its price point, which underlines Jay’s contention that “a guy making his own wine with his own grapes is going to take better care of them than someone who sells them by the pound to a corporation.”

On that note, I say “Cheers!” to resolutions I will actually keep. And I’ll be sharing those playlists soon.

The point is that if there is enough punch, people tend not to care, or even notice, that the rolls have not risen, that little brother’s girlfriend has a nose ring (or five), that Grammy and Gran haven’t actually spoken a civil word to each other in more than thirty years. This is the theme of Robert Earl Keen’s infectious (and spot-on) anthem, “Merry Christmas from the Family,” which starts out with the line, “Mom got drunk and Dad got drunk at our Christmas party.” Of course they did. The song is populated by ex-wives and irritating cousins, and the rest of the kind of extended clan most of us try to avoid until the holidays inevitably roll around. In the song, Keen’s crowd drinks Champagne punch, homemade eggnog, margaritas, and Bloody Marys. I am not that ambitious. Punch, followed by the best wine you can afford, should do it. For one thing, an elegant punch bowl (or silver pitcher) puts the sheen of propriety on the fact that what you’re really doing is serving up a big batch of holiday denial. It is also a genuinely festive vessel. I was reminded of this when I saw William Yeoward’s gorgeous glass bowl with cups at Corzine & Co. on Taigan the other day. It would be perfect for my milk punch, and for Robert Earl’s Champagne punch too. Either concoction will provide a merry little lift to the day even if you already like your relatives.

The recipe for the milk punch is below; for the Champagne punch, I’d go to Brooks Reitz’s excellent French 75 recipe from last week’s Fetch and expand the measurements for a crowd (don’t bother to shake—just stir it all up in a pitcher, and pour into a bowl if you have one.)

Milk Punch

Yield : 30 Serving

For the Simple Syrup:

1½ cups sugar

¾ cup water

For the Punch:

2 quarts whole milk

1 quart vanilla ice cream or heavy cream

4 cups brandy

2 cups bourbon

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

whole nutmeg

To make the simple syrup, combine the sugar and water in a saucepan and stir to dissolve sugar. Heat over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until mixture is boiling. Let simmer until the mixture is clear, about 8 minutes. Pour into a jar and cool. Refrigerate until cold.

To make the punch, whisk the milk and the ice cream or heavy cream together in a large bowl until it is blended. (If using ice cream, and you are serving from a punch bowl over a period of time, you can leave some fairly big lumps so it will stay cold longer.) Stir in the spirits and the extract and simple syrup to taste. To serve, pour into highball glasses and grate nutmeg on top (or grate it over punchbowl).

Brooks has a “real” job as manager of front-of-house operations at Mike Lata’s much-lauded Fig restaurant in Charleston. Before that, he ran the beverage and cocktail programs at a restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky, which is where Jack Rudy originated. “I began to think about ways to make our drinks menu special, using things we could produce in house,” he told me. “My biggest fear was making something ourselves and having it turn out not to be delicious—just because it’s homemade doesn’t always make it better.” But the homemade tonic was indeed better, and when he arrived in Charleston and introduced it as an ingredient in one of Fig’s “Daily Cocktails,” it became so immediately popular, he decided to bottle the stuff.

For this he should receive the accolades of a grateful nation. American tonic water is ghastly stuff, vapid and overly sweet, as well as deep insult to decent gin. The first time I tasted a homemade tonic, it was at a newish place on Rampart Street in New Orleans’s French Quarter called, fittingly, Bar Tonique.  As soon as I took a long and bracing swallow of Plymouth gin (a favorite of John D. McDonald’s intrepid beach bum Travis McGee) mixed with the heavily quinine-y house-made tonic, I understood why all those Brits were content to brave the heat and live out their days in India perpetuating Her Majesty’s Empire.

Brook’s tonic is not just bracing but delicious, made with quinine, of course, but also lemon grass, orange peel, and the appropriate amount of sugar. He uses it in a variety of cocktails (as does the bar manager at Sean Brock’s hot new Husk in Charleston), some of which you might be reading about in the coming months. Still, there are times when only a G&T will do. My friend and fellow Garden & Gun columnist Roy Blount writes this month of drinking them while floating in the river that border his Massachusetts backyard (and which flooded his basement during the recent hurricane). Last winter, when Roy and I were on some panels at the Key West Literary Festival (an event I highly recommend), we repaired every evening to the tower of the beach condo where we were ensconced to watch the sunsets with his wife Joan Griswold and assorted other friends.

Clearly, the only thing to drink on that occasion was a G&T, which is the way my husband feels about the weekend afternoons he has been spending watching his alma mater LSU annihilate pretty much every team in the SEC. He has been producing his own tonic too—first he makes seltzer with the aid of a Penquin, an excellent contraption available at Williams Sonoma that was given to us by Roy and Joan as a house present, and then he mixes it with Jack Rudy according to the directions on the bottle.

Since it’s a tad chilly for sunset watching, and since I prefer to spend my own weekends doing almost anything besides watching football, I am going to be making the Jack Rudy French 75 Brooks writes about in his inaugural column.  It is beautiful, perfect for the season, and so delicious that it has replaced my formerly favorite champagne cocktail. That one, another invention of Bar Tonique, involved dousing a sugar cube with Fee Brothers Grapefruit bitters at the bottom of the flute. Brook’s is equally refreshing, a lot more complex, and ridiculously easy to make. Your guests from now until New Year’s will thank you, and for the Super Bowl crowd, there’s always the Jack Rudy G&T to fall back on.

Over the course of many Christmases I was: a cowgirl with a short skirt and boots a la a junior Dale Evans; an Indian chief with a buckskin suit and full-blown headdress, a ballerina with a pink tulle skirt and toe shoes. I have a vague recollection of some Heidi-esque Alpine get-up, and then there was my favorite, a gypsy outfit with white organza puffed sleeves, a black velvet bodice embroidered in gold sequins, and a multi-colored striped satin skirt. Looking back on it now, it was the stuff of a John Galliano fever dream.

By the time I was around eleven, she started buying me real clothes that my mother sorely wished were still costumes. She gave me a floor-length plaid wool hostess skirt that matched my mother’s so that we could both wear them on Christmas night. But then I insisted on wearing mine to 6^th grade with the ruffled poet’s blouse that was also under the tree. The year my mother was most horrified was the year I got the pair of fluffy powder blue angora pants with a matching tunic top that was shot through with silver lurex threads and turned me into a holiday version of Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver (or my father’s secretary who memorably wore a lame pantsuit to the Reed-Joseph Christmas party). Not yet being in possession of evening shoes, I took a tip from Glamour magazine and spray-painted a pair of old clogs silver. I wore that outfit to school too, as well as to every party we were invited to.

The effect of the regrettable blue ensemble was the same as my beloved gypsy dress, which is the same as what really fabulous, extravagant clothes can do even now. It allowed me to be somebody else—in that particular case, a grown-up. My most fervent wish in those days was to somehow wake up and be 25, or maybe even 30, and my grandmother’s wildly indulgent and altogether inappropriate gifts allowed me to be transported there for at least a little while.

I was thinking about all this when I looked at the clothes in “Bright Young Things” in Fetch this week. I would bet money that if Juney Bloom’s sequined gold apron had existed in my grandmother’s time, it would have been wrapped and under our tree, and she would have loved Bonnie Young every bit as much as I would have loved being in Bonnie’s ruffled gold Zazni dress. One of my favorite photographs of the two of us was taken at our house in Mississippi on Christmas morning and contains much the same palette.  I was in my sequined gypsy dress and she was in an Oriental gold brocade dressing gown with frog closures. Like most of us, we both adored to dress up and be transported.

The problem was solved when I realized I was surrounded by the best—and most appropriate—decoration imaginable: the citrus trees I kept in pots were so loaded with fruit their branches grazed the ground. Citrus season is Christmas season in Louisiana, so I got to work. I wired my huge Meyor lemons to the wreaths, which I then hung on the bright green shutters that flanked the first floor breezeway of the house I lived in; I hung more lemons between the swags of garland I draped above on the balcony. I went to the French market a few blocks away and bought bags of pecans and satsumas and kumquats to pile in the bowls and compotes I put on almost every possible surface. I covered the tree in nothing but white lights, silver balls, and more kumquats I hooked and hung directly on the branches.

When I finished, I felt like I couldn’t have been anywhere else but New Orleans, and even though I’ve moved from my Quarter oasis to the Garden District, I still have huge pots of citrus and I’ve followed pretty much the same plan ever since. These days my tree is covered in the birds and blown glass ornaments I collect rather than fresh kumquats, but some of those ornaments are glittery representations of citrus fruit and the pomegranates that I now also grow.

I was reminded of that first citrus epiphany when I read Suzanne Rheinstein’s comments about her own decorating philosophy in this week’s Fetch. Suzanne grew up in New Orleans but worked for years in Washington before becoming a young Los Angeles bride. On the lacquered doors of D.C’s Georgetown, simple evergreen wreaths with red velvet bows looked like they’d been invented to go there. In L.A., as in New Orleans, red velvet looked, well, hot. Suzanne immediately adapted her palate to accommodate the West Coast light, using softer coral reds and limey greens. Traditions are one thing, but context is all.

On that note, I’ll leave you with an early Christmas decoration memory. My mother and her friends were all pillars of the Greenville, Mississippi Junior Auxiliary, and every year they gathered around our dining room table to make the pinecone and gumball wreaths they sold at their Christmas Bazaar. I loved to watch them working hard, drinking coffee and smoking Salem 100s (everyone smoked then); I couldn’t believe they could create such magic with the pinecones and gumballs they’d collected from our neighbors’ yards. And for years afterwards, that wreath, backed by bows of pine and cedar, hung from a mossy green ribbon on our front door. It looked exactly right on our house, which then had a roof of cedar shingles. I only hope it still exists somewhere in my mother’s attic. You never know when I might move into an entirely different context, one in which a simple pinecone wreath is the only thing that will work.