What I Did for Xmas

FEASTING IN ANOTHER TIME AND PLACE: I am not a vegetarian. But I played one at the Awhahnee Hotel dining room. The occasion was the rightfully legendary Bracebridge Dinner in Yosemite, a unique American phenomenon of lavish seven-course dining and interwoven, Elizabethan-style theater and music that dates back to 1927. Between courses of the three-and-a-half hour event, diners/audience are often courted by performers and drawn into the action. My role was to respond to the teasing query of the queenly Andrea Fulton, veteran actor/singer and Bracebridge’s inspired producer and director. As the expansively outfitted Housekeeper of Bracebridge Manor, she approached our table and asked me whether the dinner should climax with roast beef (her preference) or pork (the chef’s). “I’m afraid I’m a vegetarian,” I mumble into her microphone on cue, earning rousing laughter in the house. Later, vegetarian diners approached me as if in solidarity, but I had to confess my thespian lie.

It’s fair to say that there’s nothing in America-or beyond-quite like the Bracebridge Dinner, which is presented in its full and delicious regalia eight times in December. It’s not for the faint of wallet, and tickets are hard to come by (and available now on the Web site, bracebridgedinner.com/main.html). But the experience is rich and memorable, whatever your carnivorous proclivities.

Layers of history and role-playing figure into the dinner’s history. It was created in the first year of the classic Ahwahnee Hotel’s existence partly as a way of bringing visitors into the park during the winter season. The premise was based on the sketchbook of 19th-century writer Washington Irving, an American with a European fixation. The Bracebridge Dinner unabashedly basks in manners and costumes of another time and place, but the fact that this event takes place on the still-young turf of California adds to its enlightening allure.