Ansel Adams acting in the Bracebridge Dinner. Photograph courtesy of NPS Digital Archives.
Long before the Bracebridge Dinner became Yosemite’s most sought-after holiday celebration, it was an idea in search of a storyteller.
In 1927, Yosemite’s Ahwahnee Hotel opened its doors, revealing grand stone walls, soaring timber beams, and windows that framed the valley as if it were a cathedral. Donald Tresidder, president of the Yosemite Park & Curry Company, believed the new hotel deserved a holiday celebration worthy of its setting. He commissioned California pageant director Garnet Holme to create a Christmas spectacle inspired by Washington Irving’s A Christmas at Bracebridge Hall.
Ansel Adams acting in the Bracebridge Dinner.
Photograph courtesy of Bracebridge Dinner at Yosemite.
bracebridgedinners.com/history
Ansel Adams acting in the Bracebridge Dinner.
Photograph courtesy of the Adams’ Family Archives.
The result was a lively, slightly irreverent pageant set in a 17th-century English manor—a celebration of feasting, music, spectacle, and theatrical whimsy. Tresidder played Squire Bracebridge; his wife, Mary Curry Tresidder, was Lady Bracebridge. Guests arrived not simply for dinner, but for a full immersion into a world that felt centuries away from the granite cliffs just outside.
Enter Ansel Adams: The Lord of Misrule
Ansel Adams first joined the cast as a young performer in those earliest years, playing the wonderfully unruly Lord of Misrule, who impishly reigned over the holiday festivities. But after Garnet Holme died unexpectedly in 1929, Tresidder turned to the person he felt could rescue the production’s spirit: Ansel.
Ansel Adams at the Bracebridge Dinner. Photograph courtesy of Bracebridge Dinner at Yosemite. bracebridgedinners.com/history.
It’s easy to picture him in this role—part natural showman, part meticulous organizer, and wholly committed to craft. At the time he was already emerging as a formidable photographer, but he was equally known for his personality: big-hearted, energetic, and entirely at home in Yosemite Valley.
Photographer as Playwright
Tresidder tasked him with rewriting, reorganizing, and revitalizing the entire pageant. Adams didn’t simply polish it; he transformed it. He wrote a new script, clarified the structure, strengthened the pacing, and expanded the theatrical elements. Remarkably, the version he created in 1929 remains the conceptual backbone of the Bracebridge Dinner today.
Script for the Bracebridge Dinner written by Ansel Adams, 1954.
Courtesy of the Adams’ Family Archive
In time, Adams took on the role of the Major Domo—the commanding voice who ushered the dinner forward with booming authority and comedic flair. His wife, Virginia Best Adams, played the Housekeeper, ruling the household with warmth and wry practicality.
Together, they became the symbolic center of the pageant, guiding diners through the rituals of feasting as oversized mock platters of each course were paraded down the aisle for approval. All the while, the all-male chorus filled the hall with music. For many who attended in the 1930s, Ansel Adams was Bracebridge, his presence as indelible as his photographs.
In 1934, Adams invited San Francisco choral conductor Eugene Fulton to refine the musical dimension of the pageant. Fulton’s leadership—and the later involvement of his wife, Anna-Marie—elevated the performance into something far more sophisticated. Their musical stewardship helped propel the pageant to wider acclaim, eventually necessitating additional performances as demand grew through the 1950s, ’70s, and into the early 2000s.
By the time Adams retired from the production in 1973, the Bracebridge Dinner had become a phenomenon—part theatre, part feast, part pilgrimage.
Scene from the contemporary Bracebridge Dinner. Photograph courtesy of Bracebridge Dinner at Yosemite. bracebridgedinners.com/history
It’s tempting to see Ansel Adams purely as a photographer, a master of light and visual craftsmanship. But the story of the Bracebridge Dinner reveals something deeper: he was also an artist of collaboration and community. He understood how ritual could shape experience, how staging and sequence could heighten emotion, and how art, in all its forms, could bring people together.
His work on the Bracebridge Dinner wasn’t a footnote; it was an expression of the same principles that guided his photography: structure, harmony, clarity, and the pursuit of creative possibility.
Nearly a century later, the pageant still carries his fingerprint.
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TAOS PUEBLO Original Book by Ansel Adams and Mary Austin
“Ansel Adams, Albert Bender, Virginia Adams,” California Faces: Selections from The Bancroft Library Portrait Collection, POR: Adams, Ansel:3, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
