For all the gifts and frosted cookies you’re entitled to this holiday season, so too will come the stress-related maladies of visiting with family this time of year. Just to name a few of the classics, there’s anxiety (mom: “when are you settling down?”), sleep loss thanks to the archaic mattress in your childhood room, or pain management from matching driveway-shoveling muscles with your dad’s old man strength. We can think of only one convenient remedy that’ll not only help you survive the holidays, but may very well enhance mundane tasks like stringing lights or constructing gingerbread houses: the almighty cannabis-infused edible.
Discreet, portable, and often-times potent, we’ve scooped up 10 go-to infused foods and beverages perfect for the occasion. Wagering my bonafides as a content director for High Times and Weedmaps, as well as a Cannabis Cup judge, I’ve test-driven each of these products myself. So heed my advice when I say, start with a half dose; you can always pause your marathon of Hey Arnold! episodes and get more high if you need to.
This guide assumes you’re not buying a cannabis product for the first time. However, if you — or a person you’re buying for — are rookies when it comes to edibles, find informative primers in the form of our extracts guide, CBD gummies guide, and weed news feed.
The Chopped Cheese Pizza Has Arrived!
Jason Hoffman/Thrillist
Dose: 2mg THC and 6mg CBD per gummy (20 gummies per package)
Availability: Arizona, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Michigan, and Nevada
Kiva Confections, long regarded for their chocolate bars — which will feature a limited run of festive peppermint bark bars this holiday — has also taken off with its line of Camino gummies, launched late last year. Each flavor is inspired by a different region of California, with sparkling pear borrowing from Napa Valley’s wine country. Weighted on a higher ratio of CBD to THC, these gummies are good for a pleasant, socialized high along with a taste of a little bit of the bubbly.
Dose: 10mg THC per 12-ounce bottle
Availability: California, Colorado
Lagunitas Brewing Company has always run an unabashedly pot-friendly operation, from their collaborations with 4/20 founding fathers The Waldos to having endured a sting operation that shut down the Petaluma brewery over a single joint in 2005. Masterminded by Lagunitas brewmaster Jeremy Marshall and Absolute Xtracts budmaster Patrick Anderson, Hi-Fi is a citrusy sparkling water that, while tasting hoppy, is non-alcoholic and instead draws its buzz from an infusion of sun-grown cannabis oil. It’s also calorie-free and gluten-free — think of it as if craft beer and hard seltzer had crossed streams.
Dose: 3mg THC per bite (33 bites per package)
Availability: California
Winners of the 2017 High Times NorCal Cannabis Cup and part of Santa Rosa, California-based Cannacraft’s collective of brands, Satori chocolates are a great low-dose edible indulgence for those chocoholics out there. Take your pick from their batch of strawberries coated in milk chocolate from master chocolatier THCO or dark chocolate made with premium Colombian import Cacao Fino de Aroma.
Dose: 100 mg of THC per slab
Availability: California
With so many cannabis edibles drawing nostalgic snack food inspiration, consider Fruit Slabs as an elevated Fruit Roll-up, both in terms of using quality organic ingredients and in some of those ingredients having psychoactive effects (hint: it’s the cannabis). The OG Mango slabs have a fruit leather consistency with chunks of mango, and they’re a healthy, heady snack option since they’re vegan-friendly and made with no added sugars. At a potent 100mg of THC per slab, just be sure to nibble responsibly before transcending to your tropical paradise (or living room).
Dose: 10mg CBD per bottle
Availability: New York
Sweet Reason’s lineup of canna-bevs come in summer sips like lemon and rhubarb or strawberry and lavender, but considering spiked seltzers are now as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, a six-pack is wholly appropriate for your next white elephant party. Made with top-quality Colorado hemp extract, it’s a crisp, effervescent drink with very little sweetness and a nice dry finish.
Jason Hoffman/Thrillist
Dose: 3.7mg of THC per tablet (30 tablets per package)
Availability: California
As if Steve Jobs had hotboxed his Fiat and decided to turn from computing to cannabis, Dosist’s line of products sport a sleek, minimalist Apple-ish design with accessibly spelled-out effects, the newly-launched Dose Dial being no exception. Having built a reputation for precision dosing, the pocket-sized Dial dispenses a single peppermint tablet — available in either their THC-heavy Bliss or CBD-heavy Calm formulations — with the push of a button, providing a uniform dosage of 3.7mg. A solid gift option for someone who’s a medicator looking for innocuous packaging or is just worried about avoiding a bad edibles experience.
Dose: 20mg CBD per gumdrop (9 gumdrops per package)
Availability: Nationwide
OK Boomers, we know that today’s potent weed is not the jazz cabbage of your youth and we know that “everything is CBD now.” But in a pleasant nod to old tyme candies, Lord Jones hand-made luxury gumdrops are pristinely packaged, making for a stylish stocking stuffer. Since they’re CBD-only, consuming will queue you up for a relatively chill yet functional experience rather than being zonked out.
Dose: 50mg THC per cookie
Availability: Oregon
The only thing better than holiday cookies has to be holiday cookies… on weed. She Don’t Know’s snickerdoodles are among the Northwest’s best baked goods, especially for those with a high tolerance. The health-conscious cookies are made in a gluten-free kitchen from a recipe with local milled flour and Darigold butter that foregoes preservatives, corn syrup, or dyes.
Dose: 10mg THC per gummy (10 gummies per package)
Availability: Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Oregon
As potent as they are delicious, Wana’s all-natural sour gummies — in a variety pack of flavors like grape, raspberry, lemon, green apple, and orange — are an ideal balance of sweet and tart. The Boulder-based edibles are the brainchild of entrepreneur Nancy Whiteman, who moved from running a marketing consultancy to a marijuana startup in 2010 to running one of the industry’s most dominant cannabis brands.
Dose: 10mg THC per slip (10 slips per package)
Availability: California
Discretion and fast activation are the main draws for Kin Slips sublinguals (Latinspeak for “taken under the tongue”). The paper-thin packets make for a travel-friendly edible that can easily be stashed in a purse or wallet. While there is full product and dosing information on the main packaging, there’s no reference to cannabis or THC on the individually-packaged slips, so any nosy narcs who happen upon your stash will be none-the-wiser.
Sign up here for our daily Thrillist email, get Eatmail for more food coverage, and subscribe here for our YouTube channel to get your fix of the best in food/drink/fun.