My dear Bagginses and Boffins, Tooks and Brandybucks, Grubbs, Chubbs, Hornblowers, Bolgers, Bracegirdles and Proudfoots (Proudfeet!),

This year the dark forces of scheduling have claimed their victory. Still, we will gather to find light in dark places, when all other lights go out (i.e. the slog of January), with feasting, merriment, and a most excellent adventure! We will be sojourning to a marathon in Middle Earth and serving a proper hobbit spread to fortify us for the journey (scroll to the bottom for this year’s menu!).

Please rsvp by January 8!

Let us know if you’re planning on joining us by filling out this form. (Please visit the link if form below is not working.) If you RSVP “yes,” but later find you are unable to make it, please communicate that to us as soon as you’re able!

This Year’s Menu

Elevenses
lembas bread flavored with niphredil blossom water*

First Breakfast
hearty oatmeal**, cheeses, jams, butter, and crusty bread, a shortcut to mushrooms**, sausages, nice crispy bacon

Second Breakfast
“keep it secret” muffins, eggs on the go (scotch-style), onion pancakes**

Luncheon
aragorn’s buns and the cream-filled horn of gondor (two ways: roast meat off the bone and jackfruit*), batata harra from rhûn**

Afternoon Tea
ruins of a high tea (shire scones and clotted cream, the forgotten taste of bread, gollum’s fishes, remembered strawberries, aragorn’s coronation salad)

Dinner
shepherds of the forest pie, po-tay-toes (boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a samosa)**

Supper
frodo’s finger in the fiery chasm of mt. doom (bananas foster over crepe and cream cake)

 

+ Orc Food (“Meat’s Back off the Menu, Boys!”): beans and cornbread**

 

• **vegan; *vegetarian

 

 

“The Hobbits were conservative and continued to use a form of Kings’ Reckoning adapted to fit their own customs. Their months were all equal and had 30 days each; but they had 3 Summerdays, called in the Shire the Lithe or the Lithedays, between June and July. The last day of the year and the first of the next year were called the Yuledays. . . . The Lithedays and the Yuledays were the chief holidays and time of feasting.”

—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, “Appendix D.”