Kubla Kong: The Cooky Party

Sunday, December 6, 2009

The Cooky Party

My first cooky party was on the first Saturday of December 2004. The inspiration was somebody else's cooky party, or rather my sense of what the cooky party was going to be before I found out that it was just a regular party, but with cookies. I decided that a real cooky party should involve people making cookies on the spot, so I invited some friends over for food, drink, and a supply of butter, sugar, flour, and other ingredients (and whatever special ingredients they brought with them) and we made cookies ... some of us following recipes, some of us following whims. It was a reasonably fun time for all ... and spared me from the usual hostly responsibilities of actually entertaining my guests.

Ever since then, the cooky party has occurred on the first Saturday of December, usually with a quasi-Christmas theme ... not the "true meaning" of Christmas (hell no), but rather Santa, snowmen, absinthe, reindeer and other animals, elves, sex toys, nutcrackers, skewered shrimp, pagan deities, and those little roll-up spiral sandwiches that I like to eat compulsively.

I almost opted out of this year's celebration. I'm poor ... even poorer than usual ... and I'd just moved to a new and cheaper and smaller place not especially conducive to the rhythm and flow of a party, possibly especially not one centered on activities in the kitchen, which, in the new place, is cut off from the rest of the rooms. But friends (especially Barbara, Shane, and Aimee) encouraged me to do the cooky party at least one more time.

I took some pictures, but relatively early into the evening and not for very long, so not everybody is represented here unfortunately ... and really nothing to show for cookies either. Sorry for failing to capture the milieu, but I've never been a gifted documentarian. But you can fill in the "soundtrack" with the new stuff by Devendra Banhart, The xx, The Good Listeners, Miss Li, Bob Dylan, Imelda May, interspersed with Christmas and Hanukkah songs and selected tracks from the Verve Remixed series, featuring dancefloor takes on Sarah Vaughn, Dinah Washington, etc.