St. Louis, MOHoliday Bars

St. Louis Magazine has covered this Small Change pop-up since Ted and Jamie Kilgore and Ted Charak, the team behind Planter's House, first opened it in 2016. Each holiday season the corner room fills with tinsel, vintage ornaments and a nostalgic soundtrack for a Griswold-family-meets-Christmas-Story sendup of the season, and the magazine has returned to it as one of the city's original Christmas pop-ups every year since. Order the Snowball Old Fashioned or the Christmopolitan, the two drinks the magazine keeps naming as its standing favorites.

Sauce Magazine and St. Louis Magazine have both covered this Soulard staple's annual holiday transformation, running since 2019 and now in its sixth year. The dining room fills with icicle lights, wrapping paper on the walls and scenes lifted from Elf and Christmas Vacation, and the regular menu gives way to a themed lineup of roughly a dozen cocktails and shots built around a boozy hot chocolate. Order that hot chocolate first, then work through the rest of the seasonal list before it closes out the year.

St. Louis Magazine calls this the city's first tiki-inspired holiday pop-up, a seasonal turn for the Kilgore and Charak team's flagship cocktail bar that trades pine for palm trees each winter. The regular list steps aside for a tropical Christmas run of rum and coconut drinks served in novelty tiki mugs, including a coconut-shaped Coco Ho Ho Ho, while the room fills out in island-meets-holiday decor. Order the coconut drink first, then ask staff which of the rotating tiki mugs is worth taking home.