DeMarco's in Aberdeen Rings in 36th Christmas

A small group of people waited patiently along the sidewalk in front of , a full hour before the shop even opened on the morning of Christmas Eve.

"This is a traditional thing for us," Mike Botti, of Middletown, said. He has been coming to DeMarco's since they opened in 1965 and every year, on the morning of Christmas Eve, he arrives early to pick up his family's order of bread to avoid the long wait.

"I knew on Dec. 26 last year that I would have to be here at 8 a.m.," Botti said.

Louis DeMarco started the bakery on Dec. 9, 1965, making this their 36th Christmas serving the local community.

"He was baking since he was fifteen," said his adult son Eugene, who also works at the bakery. He joined the family business in 1985 and his brother Robert joined about six years later as the head baker. A true family owned and operated business, Eugene's 15-year-old daughter also recently started to come in and help out.

DeMarco's trademark item is their fresh baked bread, although their vodka sauce and chicken salad also fly off the shelves, according to Eugene.

"It's just good. Everything is made by hand, the bread's hand rolled," he said. "The way we bake is a slow process, a traditional, old style of baking."

The family business is part bakery, part deli and part catering service. Customers can find everything from microwave-ready personal dinners and fresh baked bread to hand-made sausage and lunch meat, and can also place an order for trays of food if they are entertaining. Eugene stressed that everything except for the frozen ravioli and packaged cookies is made right there in the shop.

A quick trip into the busy kitchen verifies this, as a butcher, a chef and multiple bakers bustle around to complete orders.

They received so many advanced orders for Christmas that by Dec. 17, DeMarco's had to stop accepting them. Counting just rolls alone, they had to make close to 1,500 for Christmas Eve morning.

"We had to stop taking orders around the seventeenth because it's just not physically possible," Eugene said.

To accommodate all of the catering orders, DeMarco's had to rent refrigerated trucks for extra storage. Those responsible for cooking and baking put in twelve hour days the week leading up to Christmas, just to make sure everyone's orders would be filled.

"This week there were only about three or four hours each day that someone wasn't here working," Eugene said.

The long line on Christmas Eve morning is more of a tradition than a suprise, Eugene noted. He recalls a particularly long line about three years ago when the bakery was across the parking lot in the building Wachovia Bank now occupies.

"The line went through the parking lot and down 34," he said.

The long line people will happily wait on for a taste of DeMarco's at Christmas should stand as a testament to the high quality of the food served, but Eugene believes it is the kind, friendly atmosphere of the bakery that draws customers in.

"You can go anywhere and get the same thing. But people come here for our customer service," Eugene said.