Quotes of the Day

It's the most wonderful time of year for cookbooks, which are hitting store shelves faster than snowflakes pile up in a blizzard. This year, some of the best are about the holidays themselves and how to celebrate them in style.

Celebrity caterer Serena Bass, who plans parties for the likes of Sarah Jessica Parker, Ralph Lauren and Kate Spade, offers up some of her party-throwing secrets in Serena, Food & Stories. Bass cooked her first dinner party at age 16 (for her older sister's boyfriend) by reading directly from a cookbook, and the experience shows: her precise directions and encouraging, down-to-earth tone make it easy for even the most tentative cook to do the same. The recipes are for creative, homestyle foods with innovative gourmet touches like adding juniper berries to potato salad. The book is dotted with amusing stories, like the time Bass made aioli for her idol Julia Child, and one about how a sister's boyfriend ended up being Serena's first husband.

British food writer Nigella Lawson's Feast is written in her signature evocative style and focuses on families. "Whenever an occasion matters to us, we mark this with food, from a birthday cake to a wedding breakfast," she writes in the introduction. "But Feast is not just about big-deal special occasions: it's about the way we use food to celebrate life." It is indeed; Lawson offers menus for holidays and rites of passage big and small, including Christmas, Thanksgiving, Eid, Hanukkah, Passover and Easter. The most fun is a Valentine's Day repast with options for a meal at the table or in bed.

For the fiscally challenged there is Party Central: A Month-by-Month Guide to Entertaining on the Cheap by the editors of Budget Living magazine, which serves up a year of fêtes for every major holiday, as well as minor ones like Oscar night and the Kentucky Derby. The plan for each soiree includes easy-to-follow recipes, detailed shopping lists, music suggestions and answers to perennial head-scratchers like how many bottles of tequila you'll need for 30 to 40 guests (answer: two, at least for most gatherings). Party on.

• Lisa McLaughlin