ChristmaHanaKwanzika

This is the tenth post in the holiday guest series ChristmaHanaKwanzica. Kathleen writes A Wedding Runs Through It and is an absolute delight. She was married in May and her wedding recaps are absolutely stunning! She let me know she’s got some great posts up her sleeves for the near future, and knowing Kathleen and her sweet creativity, I’m sure they won’t be near disappointing.

For some people, things like snow, mall Santas or Starbucks gingerbread lattes are harbingers of the holiday season; in my family, champagne and cheesecake are the telltale signs that Christmas is right around the corner. For as long as I can remember, my parents have hosted a holiday party that deals exclusively in champagne and homemade desserts. That may not sound terribly unique, but over the years the Poe Family Christmas Party has evolved into a hallmark of the season around which our friends and family plan their holiday calendars.

Like many venerable holiday traditions, this one comes from humble origins. My parents have slides (which I regrettably couldn’t scan) of modest holiday gatherings in their Athens, Ga. apartment from the mid-’70s that generally involved a platter of cookies, a cheese tray and whatever booze was in their liquor cabinet. After they moved to Atlanta and attended a champagne-and-dessert soiree thrown by one of Dad’s law firm colleagues, they decided to adopt that format for their own party. Having three kids (two born in the last months of the year) got in the way of my parents’ making it a regular event for a while, but once we moved into a new house in 1988 — one with room for entertaining — an annual tradition was firmly established, and it’s been growing ever since.

Here I am as a 6-year-old, decorating Christmas cookies for the party. Note the awesome Teddy Ruxpin bowl!

The gist of it is this: Mom and Dad buy champagne by the case, Mom bakes up a storm for about a month or two in advance (cheesecakes freeze like a dream!), and they invite all of their friends over for holiday merriment the weekend before Christmas. It sounds sort of swanky, but it’s actually a surprisingly affordable way to entertain a crowd.

I trawled through the family archive and came up with a shot of the party spread on the dining room table back in 1989:

Which looks a little puny in comparison to the same spot in 2010:

The array of sweets extends back into the kitchen these days; I think the tally of different desserts topped 35 this year. While Mom historically has made all the desserts with only a cookie-decorating assist from the kids, in recent years my sister Emily and I have become important contributors. Mom has taken us on as cheesecake apprentices, fielding late-night calls about baking times or photo text messages with pictures of cracked cakes and assuring us it’s nothing a little whipped cream or other garnish can’t cover up. This year I contributed my first original recipe, a MoonPie cheesecake, which was ridiculously delicious if I do say so myself. Check it out:

When we were younger, each of us kids was assigned a task: my sister Emily and I took guests’ coats at the door, and our brother Matt was on luminary detail outside (which involved some renegade bottle rockets on more than one occasion). When Emily hit eighth grade or so, Mom recruited her and her friends to be the kitchen crew, washing discarded plates and glasses and refilling trays of cookies. My buddies and I took over those duties when Emily went off to college, but put our own spin on the job: we dressed in our most formal finery. (What can I say? We love to dress up.)

Ahh, junior year. That’s me rocking the full-length velvet dress at bottom right.

After I went off to college, the Christmas party became the first mass-gathering of all my friends returning from far-flung universities over the holidays. It also became a venue for my friends from home to meet the friends from college I had enticed to come, which has forged many new connections. These days, my brother, sister and I canvass our friends in Atlanta and across the country via evite; as a result, the average age of partygoers has dropped considerably from the all-grownup days (and the amount of champagne consumed has spiked). We’ve had friends join us from Illinois, Texas, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Michigan, California and even Brazil! (OK, so that last one was not exclusively a party trip… But still! We’ve reached a new continent!) Over the course of a typical Christmas party, we average at least 300 people coming through the front door.

Probably the most remarkable thing about the party is that we have not missed hosting all of our friends at Christmastime in 22 years; not even after Grandma Dot, my dad’s mom, passed away the week before the ‘95 party, or after my mom had an unforeseen series of surgeries from June to November of 2009 that had her pretty well out of commission for months. (In the case of the latter, my sister and I split most of Mom’s baking between us, which made us wonder how on earth she ever got all those cheesecakes made back in the day with three kids and a full-time job.) The holiday party tradition is part of the fabric of my family, and it’s even created new traditions within itself over the years — but that’s another essay altogether. Our friends and family have come to depend on the party to bring everyone together for this particular form of holiday merriment, and it’s become such an integral part of my family’s holiday season that we can’t imagine ever not doing it. There’s no stopping the Poe Christmas Party!

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