In Defense of Panettone

My desire to balance subtlety with festivity this holiday season.

When the holidays are here, it’s undeniable. Our email inboxes clutter with sales (and sale extensions, and bundle deals, and shipping cut-off reminders). Storefronts decorated with lights, trees, and frosted snowflakes; the homes and apartments on my walks with Christmas lights, candles, and menorahs. The grocery store starts playing holiday radio and changing out their displays, Christmas tree vendors set up shop in the streets. Party invites slowly start rolling in, and holiday cards make their way to our mailboxes.

Our social media feeds are littered with recipes, decorating ‘hacks’, and gift guides. The travel begins. Maybe we even get some snow. The desire for velvet, sparkle, and sequins infiltrates wardrobes.

We start to compartmentalize the events and to-dos in our lives by whether or not they should be dealt with in the last days of this year or next. We hope to remember this time period through photos, words, and marked memories.

And while we’re out shopping, we may notice specialty goods — cakes, cookies, Advent calendars, poinsettias, ornaments, wreaths. One thing I’ve always paid attention to: large displays of stacked boxes of panettone¹. Especially common in your Italian bakeries or specialty shops, in New York, at least, these boxed cakes are also found in more common supermarkets.

“Who is buying those?” I used to think. Reserved for grandmothers, gifts from your corporate boss, and church potlucks, over the years, panettone has felt like the personification of an aunt’s living room — clad in brown shag carpet, floral curtains, and a faint smell of stale cigarettes (though no one has smoked inside this room since 1996).

There’s a Panettone on the coffee table in this room, I just know it. (Photo by Annie Spratt)

I don’t think I tried panettone until I was in high school, when one inevitably ended up in our kitchen. Potentially a gift from an aunt or a corporate boss, I remember the panettone was conveniently regifted and brought along to a family holiday party.

Still, my interest was piqued. The panettone was opened when it was time for dessert, likely in an effort to be polite, and I wandered past the cookies from the Italian bakery and homemade cakes and cut right into the panettone.

I grabbed a cup of coffee, sat down with my slice, and dug in. “This is good,” I thought. I dipped the panettone in my coffee. The subtle sweetness, paired with its citrus and almond notes, danced across my tongue. I thought about having panettone for breakfast and for dessert.

The next year, when we were gifted a panettone, I dug into it right away. This time, the dried fruit was replaced with chocolate chips. I was in heaven.

It feels silly to sit here and write a love letter to panettone for a few reasons. One, I am not Italian, and two, I don’t think I’ve eaten one in ten years.

I don’t think I’ve ever purchased a panettone. I’ve just made sure to enjoy it when it’s around, appreciating its presence amongst desserts that are more flavorful or more colorful or more interesting.

But I still love panettone and will come to its proverbial rescue when Reddit threads and Times articles discuss its validity. And whenever I see those boxes piled high, I consider throwing one into my grocery cart, remembering how pleasantly surprised I was the first time I tried it. I ultimately decide against it, year after year. Panettone is a gift, I think. But it’s one I don’t gift because I know how it’s perceived — will my generosity just end up at the end of your Aunt Tiffany’s dessert table or an office break room?

Panettone is delicious, and I’m convinced anyone who says otherwise hasn’t actually tried one. A narrative has formed before the box is even opened, the panettone regifted without second thought. With the holidays often considered over-the-top — in decoration, in consumerism, in consumption — it seems that a dessert that embraces subtlety has no place at our tables.

Photo by blackieshoot on Unsplash

Each year, it feels like the tree needs to be bigger, the gift guides longer, our stomachs fuller, while our bank accounts empty to make it all happen. While I love a big tree and being able to show my love through gifting, I also find myself craving a more low-key holiday. As a rule, since my son was born, we wake up at our house on Christmas Day — just the three of us — and ease into the morning, open presents, and enjoy breakfast. If I can help it, we don’t leave the house.

It’s easy to get caught up in the rush of the holiday season, but I want to make sure I can slow down enough to really enjoy it. The past few years, my holidays have felt like a blur — the burnout setting in too soon, the jolliness feeling forced. This year, I’m striving for a balance between being celebratory but not taking the season too seriously.

Perhaps a stretch, but panettone encapsulates that desire. It’s festive yet understated and overlooked. But when given the chance, it scratches the itch. It’s breakfast, it’s dessert, it can be purchased in a box. It’s not a cookie that looks like a cold cut or a puff pastry that looks like it was carved by Michelangelo.

It’s the equivalent of Pantone choosing a color that is basically white as their color of the year².

It’s the brown shag carpet and floral curtains that haven’t been changed yet because, even though they’re out of vogue, they still do their job. It’s plastic on the furniture and a plastic Santa in the corner. It’s the opposite of an aesthetic, social-media-perfect holiday.

And this season, I invite us all to embrace a little bit more of that.

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1. This essay intentionally does not attempt to recommend a specific panettone to buy. That’s not the point of this essay. If you’re curious, I invite you to do a little research. There are plenty of publications that can help — just Google “best panettone”.

2. I agree with a lot of the critique of this choice, for what it’s worth; I just couldn’t help but acknowledge the metaphor.