Enter our holiday cheese ball contest!

• Ashford Stamper
• You can’t have a ball over the holidays without a ball … a cheese ball.

Do you love cheese balls? More important, do you make cheese balls? If you answered both questions with a resounding yes, The Pitch has a special holiday contest for you. Want to know more? Read on.

My mother didn’t think the winter holidays officially started until someone put out the first cheese ball of the season. She had her own recipe for a distinctive creation that involved using food coloring to tint cream cheese red and green, which she then layered, rolled into a ball and finally coated with chopped peanuts. If that sounds horrible — well, it was. Still, it added a colorful note to her limited repertoire of holiday snacks. (You know, like pigs in a blanket and celery spears topped with Kraft pimento cheese spread).

I tried to do some serious research to find when the cheese ball — the kind served on party trays with crackers and fruit — was invented, but I came up empty-handed. Angela Wiggins, in the corporate affairs office at Kraft headquarters, tells Fat City that Kraft introduced a recipe for a “cheese roll” in 1942. (The ingredients included Philadelphia cream cheese and Roka Blue cheese.) Wiggins says the earliest printed Kraft recipe for a “party cheese-ball” was dated 1955. That recipe’s ingredients included Philadelphia cream cheese and Cracker Barrel cheddar cheese, shredded.

And the recipes have hardly changed since.