Before the Castro Valley High School Basketball team’s first crab feed even began, I realized I was outclassed when a woman at the next table over unpacked the bag next to her seat. Up came a bouquet of crab crackers, which she distributed to her friends. Next came seasoning shakers, followed by insulated bowls that steamed when she unscrewed the lids.

I had to ask what they contained. Melted garlic butter, she told me.

“Wait, they don’t serve butter?” I asked.

“The Moose Lodge will sell you a butter warmer,” she replied. “But I prefer my own.”

Northern California’s commercial crab fishing season began Nov. 15. A few weeks later, so did the season for crab-feed fundraisers. From mid-December through March, from Santa Barbara to Klamath (Del Norte County), hundreds of community groups host crab feeds with the requisite garlic bread, overcooked pasta, prize raffles and no-host bars.

For the Hayward Castro Valley Moose Lodge, the small fundraiser I attended was merely a warm-up: The lodge is set to host six crab feeds this winter.

Given how entrenched crab feeds are in our calendars, you’d think the tradition was so venerable that it would make cioppino look like some upstart gentrifier, but the feast’s origins are post-post-Gold Rush.

Some coastal Californian nations roasted rock crabs and Dungeness crabs in earth ovens. Others baked them in hot sand pits. However, according to Ira Jacknis, a research anthropologist at Berkeley’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology, native Californians probably didn’t gorge on Dungeness with the same profligacy those of us now do. Northern California tribes “certainly had feasts and ate a lot of crab when it was in season and abundant, but the kind of all-you-can-eat occasion was not really known to them,” Jacknis wrote in an email.

Crab free-for-alls seem to have arrived on the West Coast with white settlers from the East Coast, who may have adapted Mid-Atlantic crab boils to the fat, sweet Dungeness they caught in the Pacific and sold on the Fisherman’s Wharf for pennies apiece. The first San Francisco crab feast to be mentioned in the San Francisco Chronicle, the June 1871 meeting of the Twelfth Ward Democratic Club, was as generous with the Old Monongahela Rye as the crab, and the meal was followed by songs and toasts to the newspaper covering the event.

The phrase “crab feed” appeared in the Baltimore Sun as early as 1902, and made its way to Marin County around World War I. Here, for the past century, crab feeds have primarily belonged to the world of social clubs and sporting groups such as the Eagles, the American Legion and yachting clubs — cheap food for a crowd.

When the 19-year-old Joe DiMaggio signed to the San Francisco Seals in 1934, his fishing family hauled a heap of cooked, cracked crabs to the stadium to celebrate. “When some men eat crabs it looks like an act of cannibalism,” reporter Ed Hughes cracked at the time. “There are others who can take shell fish in stride.”

Crab feeds appear to have evolved into fundraisers in the 1960s and early 1970s, when they merged — both culinarily and functionally — with the spaghetti feeds then popular with youth groups.

Bob Quinn, who helped found the Mendocino chapter of the Knights of Columbus in 1984, says that his chapter’s annual crab feed, begun that year, has graduated from a church hall to one that seats 220 and from one night in March to two. Even though the event now competes against feeds hosted by the local fire department, police department and Catholic church, not to mention Mendocino’s Crab, Wine and Beer Festival, tickets still sell out before Thanksgiving. More and more inland visitors come to Mendocino to attend the feed. In 2012, a couple from Tahoe bought tickets for their wedding party in lieu of throwing a reception.

Chris Lam, seafood buyer for Pucci Foods in Hayward, says that his company supplies cold, cooked crab to fundraisers as far away as Sacramento and Stockton. Most of the shellfish comes off the boats, but even during crab season, fresh crab isn’t always available on the day of the event, so he has to provide frozen meat from up the coast.

Lam instructs his customers to order 1½ crabs per person. “By the time they clean it, it’s a pound, pound and a quarter of meat,” Lam says. “Most people can’t eat more than that. Remember, you’re not just going to eat crab. You’ve got garlic bread and pasta and salad ahead of it.”

For years, I have been frustrated in my attempts to find a crab feed that wasn’t already sold out. Eventbrite has made the search much easier, advertising dozens of dinners hosted by Elks Clubs, granges, police departments and senior centers in every city in the Bay Area.

Tips for attending a crab feed Where to find them: Search EventBrite (www.eventbrite.com) in your location or look for the website of your nearby Elks Lodge, fire department, Knights of Columbus chapter or the like. (The Castro Valley Hayward Moose Lodge website, for example: http://lodge1491.moosepages.org/). Do it now. Pack list: Bring your own crab cracker, melted butter, Wet Naps and seasonings. Bring extra money for: Drinks, tips (especially if the servers are high school basketball players), raffles and auctions, and a butter warmer if you’ve forgotten one.

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Bob Pirone, administrator of the Hayward-Castro Valley Moose Lodge, says his organization has hosted crab feeds since the chapter opened in 1947. The lodge certainly has the ritual down, from the bartenders who begin pouring wine two hours before dinner to the herb mix smeared on the garlic bread. Yes, it sells $10 butter warmers, basically a ramekin held over a tealight. Consider the fee a first-timer charge: When you’re on your second pound of crab, melted butter is, I discovered, essential.

According to Denee Evans, whose son is a senior on the basketball team, Castro Valley High School doesn’t fully fund its sports teams, so parents must find a way to pay for uniforms, transportation for three basketball squads, referee fees and other expenses. “Fundraising is a big part of what the parents and athletes do,” she says. The Moose Lodge offered to host and coordinate the event — all she and other parents had to do was to supply the raffle prizes, sell tickets and provide the labor.

Since the varsity players had a game that night, Evans convinced the freshmen and junior varsity teams to wait tables, dressed in black pants and white shirts that billowed out from their newly stretched frames. As guests found their way to tables in the brightly lit hall and as the DJ plugged his playlist into the sound system, she gave the kids one last pep talk. The lecture huddle broke with a “One, two, three, Trojans!” that set off cheers from the players’ biggest fans.

How can you not feel a little better about the fate of the world when you’re surrounded by bib-wearing parents, coltish 15-year-olds, portraits of past Moose Lodge leaders, Christmas decorations, stuffed moose heads, and conversations that grow more and more raucous until bowls of the Pacific Ocean’s sweetest crustaceans arrive? “I think we’ll probably have more, hopefully next year in combination with the girls’ basketball team,” Evans said later.

As for me, when faced with my allotted pound and a half of cracked legs, I was forced to take stock: Was I a cannibal, or was I a man who could take his shell fish in stride? With no crab cracker but my incisors, my grasp on civilization may have suffered. According to my shirt, though, at least the plastic bib did its job.