Christy Turlington Burns liked the focaccia with Portobello mushrooms, Gruyère, and caramelized onion butter. Pamela Schein Murphy, the wife of the chef of Landmarc, Marc Murphy, wondered if the mustard mayonnaise in the turkey sandwich would smell unappealing.

Picking out which sandwiches to serve to adults was just one of the tasks Monday at a gathering of the chairwomen of the Nutcracker Family Benefit, a delightful New York tradition scheduled for the afternoon of December 8.

At the table next to the chairwomen, their children decorated a gingerbread house and tasted the sandwiches made for them, including cream cheese and jelly and a star-shaped American cheese and butter, both on white bread.

Alan Bell of the catering company David Ziff gave the chairwomen two options for packaging the meals. The red rectangle box won out over a taller box with a handle. Green tissue paper and a gold streamer will be tucked inside, along with the sandwiches, some cookies, and chocolate butterscotch brownies. Each year after the performance of Balanchine’s “Nutcracker,” guests of the benefit gather on the promenade of the New York State Theater to meet the New York City Ballet and School of American Ballet dancers, who pose for pictures and offer autographs. One of those dancers will be the daughter of chairwoman Kristin Kennedy Clark, Christina Clark. Miss Clark, 9, will play the trumpeter.

“It’s fun, I like seeing the decorations and how happy the people are,” Miss Clark said.

The event is on target to raise $600,000. Tickets start at $450.

Park Patrons Party to the Grave

For those with a Halloween bash to throw or attend in the next few days, there’s no harm in stealing ideas from Central Park Conservancy’s Halloween Ball — as long as you make a donation to maintain the park. The ball raised $900,000 toward the conservancy’s $25 million annual budget, so there’s plenty left to give. With 550 very creative guests in attendance, the party offered plenty of costume ideas. One woman dressed as “silence is golden,” and her husband dressed as “money talks.” Together they were Mr. and Mrs. Cliché. Tarot card costumes, handmade at a cost of $50 a card, conveniently slipped onto the backs of chairs during dinner. The pack of friends dressed as “tabloid tragedies” included Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, a paparazzo with a black eye, a lawyer, and a cop. The friends who wore skeleton aprons called themselves “social X-rays.” Fruit costumes were a popular choice, perhaps a sign that people are responding to Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign to make New Yorkers healthy.

However, the party menu was more on the sinful side. The first course was a pumpkin velouté with cranberry stew topped with toasted marshmallows, followed by a decent short rib entrée. The dessert was “Death by Chocolate,” which looked like a grave. It consisted of a tombstone cookie embossed with an image of the park’s Bethesda Foundation, resting in a pile of “dirt,” actually four ounces of chocolate cake crumbs. Underneath was the “tomb,” two slices of Génoise cake layered with a dulce de leche, amaretto, and hazelnut filling.

“I planned gummy worms coming out of the tomb, and also Marzipan daffodils, but in the end we kept it simple,” the executive chef of the catering company Sonnier & Castle, Cornelius Gallagher, who created the menu, said.

agordon@nysun.com