Only Lady Luck Gives Out Invitations to a Jolly Good Christmas at Yosemite

A lucky 1,750 lottery winners delight each Christmastime in the toasts and tastes of the annual Bracebridge Dinner at Yosemite National Park, complete with snow if they’re even luckier.

The toasts are echoed by the Andrea Fulton Chorale and the Bracebridge cast from the San Francisco area, some of them having been involved with the dinner for more than 30 years. The tastes are those of a sumptuous seven-course dinner in the high-ceilinged, log-beamed Ahwahnee Hotel.

Five seatings of 350 revelers each are held yearly, two on Dec. 22, one on Christmas Eve and two on Christmas Day. The four-hour pageant is set amid Squire Bracebridge’s Yorkshire Christmas celebration, adapted from Washington Irving’s Sketch Book account of Christmas at Bracebridge Hall, a fictional English country estate in the late 1700s.

Naturalist-photographer Ansel Adams helped start the lavish feast in 1927, the year the hotel opened. Adams was the first jester, the Lord of Misrule, and, in 1929, assumed the role of director. Five years after his death, Adams’ spirit still pervades the period-dress gathering, ironically with a ban on cameras.

Once a guest has beaten the greater than 10 to 1 odds of being chosen in the $100 dinner lottery, he or she is advised by letter to keep in line with longstanding tradition. “We insist that all Bracebridge Dinner guests refrain from bringing cameras into the dinner room,” Bill Wymore, general manager of the Ahwahnee, says. “This policy was established at the request of Ansel Adams to preserve the atmosphere of Bracebridge Hall.”

Each course begins with a whimsical prelude. When the boar’s head and the Baron of the Beef are presented to a lavishly dressed Squire Bracebridge, played by a stout local actor, the baron is knighted Sir Loin. The diners, seated at large round tables, get more into the spirit of the evening as the courses progress at the base of a pedestaled, altar-like head table. The squire and his cast of characters, including the jester and a dancing bear, lead the revelry and are presented each course for approval, with song.

The dinner, billed as semi-formal to formal, grows more effervescent as it progresses from peacock pie (crepe of goose with juniper berry sauce) to boar’s head (roast sirloin of beef) to plum pudding with hard sauce.

To be eligible for the dinner drawing, one has to plan ahead. The deadline for the 1989 Christmas dinners is Jan. 15. To receive an application for next year, anyone interested may call or write Reservations Dept., Attention: Bracebridge Dinner, Yosemite Park & Curry Co., 5410 E. Home Ave., Fresno, Calif., (209) 252-4848.

The unlucky ones will receive a letter stating politely, “Thank you very much for your interest in the Bracebridge Dinner. We are very disappointed to inform you that your application has not been chosen in the lottery.”

The luckier ones will be among the guests gathering before the huge fireplace in the Great Lounge, the blaze started with a brand handed down from that first 1927 Bracebridge celebration.