To Mavis Sand, the owner of the Head of the Slug saloon, the word lonesome rang like the bell on a cash register. Come Christmas break, Pine Cove filled up with tourists seeking small-town charm, and the Head of the Slug filled up with lonesome, disenfranchised winners seeking solace Mavis was glad to serve it up in the form of her signature (and overpriced) Christmas cocktail, the Slow Comfortable Screw in the Back of Santa's Sleigh, which consisted of — "Well, fuck off if you need to know what's in it," Mavis would say. "I'm a professional bartender since your daddy flushed the condom that held your only hope of havin' a brain, so get in the spirit and order the goddamn drink."

Mavis was always in the Christmas spirit, right down to the Christmas-tree earrings that she wore year-round to give her that "new-car smell." A sheaf of mistletoe the size of a moose head hung over the order station at her bar, and throughout the season, any unsuspecting drunk who leaned too far over the bar to shout his order into one of Mavis's hearing aids would find that beyond the fluttering black nylon whips of her mascara-plastered pseudo lashes, behind the mole with the hair and the palette knife-applied cakes of Red Seduction lipstick, past the Tareyton 100s breath and the clacking dentures, Mavis still had some respectable tongue action left in her. One guy, breathless and staggering toward the door, claimed that she had tongued his medulla oblongata and stimulated visions of being choked in Death's dark closet — which Mavis took as a compliment.