Every holiday party has at least one:
The guest who arrives on the dot and catches the hostess still clearing the bed for coats. The guy who shows up a few minutes early, before you’ve finished hiding the good Scotch.
The lady who’s almost half an hour early for the Hamboree.
“I made the mistake when my kids were little of dropping them off at school first and then coming here,” Terri Western said at 6:39 a.m. on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, peering through the locked doors of the HoneyBaked Ham store at Akers Mill on Cobb Parkway. “I called last week and they said the earliest [time] to get in was 7 a.m. And I said, ‘That’ll do.’ ”
And not just for her. With the store already slated to open three hours earlier than usual on one of its two busiest days of the year, general manager Lauren Booth had a heart and let Buckhead resident Western in even earlier to personally select one of the spiral sliced, secretively glazed hams that are literally and figuratively the centerpiece of many people’s holiday celebrations.
Yes, Americans talk — and eat — a lot of turkey. But we Southerners have a special relationship to the pig during the holiday season.
HoneyBaked’s Georgia division, with more than 300 stores in Georgia and beyond, is the company’s largest and does close to 65 percent of its annual business in November and December alone.
“We get the halo of the season in which we participate,” said Chuck Bengochea, president and CEO of HoneyBaked’s Georgia division. “Even if your life is hard, you’re still going to enjoy the holidays, and that halo spills over onto us.”
That’s some massive spill. HoneyBaked Georgia will sell nearly 7.6 million pounds of ham and turkey this November and December. At the Akers Mills store last year, that translated into 1,600 “Half Hams” (ranging from 7 pounds to 11 pounds) and 400 “mini hams” (3 pounds to 6 pounds) sold just in the four days preceding Thanksgiving.
Did awareness of that demand account for this year’s Thanksgiving Eve Eve ham-pede at Akers Mill?
All morning long, customers scurried in, citing (ultimately unfounded) fears of hours-long lines or freak sweet potato souffle shortages as a reason for turning up there before work — and even before the sun came up.
The expectant looks on their faces suggested another, happier, explanation, though. For many, it seemed, this was a more grown-up, only slightly less giddy version of the annual pilgrimage to sit on Santa’s lap.
“I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, haven’t I?” Chastain Park resident Sarah Walton half-groaned, emerging from the Akers Mill store around 7:15 a.m. with a 10-pound ham, six turkey breasts — and one slightly bewildered visiting sister from London in tow. A British expatriate of 19 years who’s married to an American, Walton simultaneously sang the praises of the hams’ glaze and giggled over the “too precious” way they’re carefully unwrapped for customers to examine, like some rare gem or priceless Rembrandt painting.
Finally she gave up trying to explain the holiday tradition and simply informed her sister, “It’s just what you do here.”
Retorted Julia Withers with a comical eye roll: “I was promised a real American Thanksgiving. I said, ‘What do you mean that requires us getting up at 6:30 in the morning to go to a ham store?!’ ”
Oh, Julia, Julia ... You only think you’re in America. In fact, you’re in Georgia, where we don’t apologize to anyone for our unique ways of celebrating the holiday season, preferring instead to gradually bring you all around to our method of doing things:
• That iconic image of Santa Claus as a jolly, rosy-cheeked fatty in a red suit and white beard? Created in 1931 and hammered home with elf-ish enthusiasm over the next three decades in magazine ads by the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co.
• Fruitcake’s position as the go-to (and give-away) holiday gift-cum-punchline? Cemented by Claxton (official motto: “The Fruit Cake Capital of the World”), home to some 2,300 people and two separate companies that together produce and ship more than 5 million fruitcakes annually.
• The very idea of treating a ham with all the reverence usually reserved for the newborn heir to the British throne — let alone some also-ran turkey at Thanksgiving and Christmas? If not specifically invented in Georgia, then definitely perfected here.
“People are really passionate about hams here,” confirmed Tim Quinn, vice president of retail and business development for the Georgia division, which is headquartered in Alpharetta. “The moment where [employees] pull back the gold foil and unveil the ham is really a ‘Ta da!’ moment. The customer wants to know the ham is going to represent them well.”
And you thought people were coming to your house to see you and judge you this holiday season. Ha!
HoneyBaked starts planning for the next holiday season almost as soon as the previous one ends. By early summer, they’ve decided how many extra seasonal employees to hire (620 for its 25 metro Atlanta stores alone this year) and where and when to deploy them to keep lines from backing up right before Thanksgiving and Christmas.
“Over years and years we’ve perfected tools down to average transactions per hour, how many associates are needed for each transaction and how long it takes,” Quinn said. “It’s 2 1/2 to 3 minutes for a customer with a HoneyBaked representative at the counter. That’s an average,” he emphasized.
It’s only an average because some people are happy with the very first ham they’re shown. And some are ... choosier. Just before the doors opened that morning, supervisor Christina Thomas reminded the counter staff to help more ham-ateur shoppers choose the right size product by asking them how many people they planned on serving. And she stressed the importance of the “Ah-Ha Moment” — that’s HoneyBaked terminology for the anticipation-building process whereby an employee plucks a gold foil-wrapped ham from a storage unit, unwraps it and then shows it off with a slow side-to-side turn that calls to mind a plump diva acknowledging the “Bravos!” raining down on her from all parts of the opera hall.
In fact, this is the customers’ moment to scrutinize and play critic: Some want more fat on their ham, others less. Some care about how the meat is marbled or how the pre-cut slices fall away from the ham itself. Some, like Michael Mink, an Atlanta session musician who was hosting 30 to 40 people for Thanksgiving, are buying two hams for the table and can’t have one look significantly different from or better than the other.
Everyone, it seems, obsesses over the topping. Each HoneyBaked ham is hand-finished with a sweet crunchy glaze the particulars of which are a more closely guarded secret than how reindeer fly. Requests for information about its ingredients are mostly met with, well, glazed looks from HoneyBaked officials. Even CEO Bengochea, after first saying that the secrecy surrounding this secret formula “is not as sexy” as the one at Coke (where he worked for eight years) wouldn’t spill the — vanilla beans? maple syrup? — during an early afternoon stop at the Akers Mill store that busy Tuesday.
For Rena Zak, what’s in the glaze isn’t as important as where it is. Everywhere. Every year.
A resident of southwest Atlanta, Zak was one of 16 people in line about 11:30 a.m., when the store was most crowded and six sales associates were busy “Ah-Ha Momenting” like mad. When her turn to step up to the counter came after about six minutes, she had the associate display a half-dozen hams, one by one, so she could study them from every angle.
“I want to make sure the crunchy topping is all intact all the way around,” Zak explained, as she prepared to drive away with the ham she had finally decided would represent her well. “That’s not for show what goes on in there.
“It more or less is the holiday.”
About the Author
