Our first holiday party was at a house in Takoma Park, where there were so many Christmas lights it looked like an underwater blur of primary colors. They had gumbo with sausages and a table full of sweets, like cranberry bread and brownies topped with red and green candy. As it is with most social gatherings these days people were retelling and reliving their stories about election night, and our friends went over to play on the piano so it wouldn’t feel so sad.
Our second party was at a bar in the city, where a friend was celebrating his birthday with a royal theme that involved a guest purporting to be Queen Elizabeth I. Like your average tavern-goer in sixteenth century England, we had pizza, as well as miniature crab cakes and chicken skewers with peanut sauce. We had an abstract discussion with some people we just met about how easy it is for a conversation to “devolve” into a conversation about the election.
The third party was a white elephant exchange at a friend’s house. We brought a straw hat and ended up with owl socks, which we considered doing well for ourselves, and this was also a birthday party so we had a white cake. Someone won a piggy bank which, as I remember, looked like a pig on goose legs, and there was some kind of joke involving the future president’s management of the economy.
(Photo: Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen.)
365 Days of Food 