meaning they fly south in the winter for a warmer climate. They spend six months on the coast of southern Georgia and six months in the hills of southern Connecticut, which allows my dad to play golf in near-perfect conditions all year long. My parents’ Georgia home is a picture of Southern hospitality. Most every surface is monogrammed—the bath towels, the coasters, the seashell-shaped soaps. Give a WASPy Southern woman a millimeter of material, and she’ll figure out a way to put someone’s initials on it. During the holidays, the monogrammed cocktail napkins are replaced by a stack of green ones that say, “Holidays with the family are always a trip. A trip to the liquor store.” I think these napkins were created with my family in mind. As my grandmother once said, elbow-deep in a Scotch and soda, “Jews don’t recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Protestants don’t recognize the Pope as the head of the church. Baptists don’t recognize each other at the liquor store.” We’re not Baptists, but based on my family’s idolatrous worship of alcohol, we might as well be.
