Tonight's cocktail is brought to you by the colour

Tonight's cocktail is brought to you by the colour orange.
 
I can’t remember whether I mentioned or not that we had instituted Cocktail Hour in the Château Ottawacker. It is actually a lot less grandiose than it sounds: Mrs. Ottawacker doesn’t drink alcohol and Ottawacker Jr. is obviously a decade too young. So in reality, the “Cocktail Hour in the Château Ottawacker” is actually just a socially acceptable way of enabling the only other member of the household to start drinking earlier in the evening. In that respect, it has been a roaring success.
 
Nonetheless, certain efforts have to be made to make it fun for other participants: Mrs. Ottawacker gets to indulge in her passion for Tostitos and salsa, and Ottawacker Jr. gets to have his own cocktails. As we are way too strict, he is not allowed pop or soda (other than on rare occasions), so we squeeze oranges, drop in a maraschino cherry and an ice cube, and top it up with Perrier or something similar. Plus, he gets to fight Mrs. Ottawacker for the Tostitos.
 
Of course, the real reason for the cocktails is to bring us together at the end of the day. Mrs. Ottawacker arrives, usually divested of the pound of flesh her company demands, and Ottawacker Jr. and I traipse in from whichever sofa has been the scene of the latest chapter of the Lord of the Rings reimagining. It allows us an extra half hour to catch up before the serious business of making dinner starts.