I wish you a moldy Christmas

Since Jell-O salads are such a favorite, I thought the best Christmas gift I could bestow might be a sampling of molded "delights" from the Better Homes and Gardens Christmas-Time Cook Book (1974).

I'll be sweet and start out with some pretty molds that might even taste halfway decent:

The rosy, grape-capped confection is the best sort of gelatin mold: the dessert masquerading as a salad.

Yep, it's an excuse to eat whipped cream and mounds of sugar and feel righteous about it because THERE'S FRUIT. Of course it's healthy.

The very Christmassy red and green confection is supposed to be a wreath:

Okay, I'm not going to pretend that lime Jell-O with celery in it or mayonnaise flavored with lemonade concentrate would be my top choice for a dessert (or even a salad), but we all know this is at least toward the center of the gelatin mold continuum (ranging from "Don't tell anybody, but I might want seconds" to "You expect me to choke that down?")

That other end of the continuum is filled with things like Christmas Vegetable Salad Mold:

Apparently holiday crudités are more festive if they're all congealed together in vinegar-flavored tomato juice?

for the ritzy families who want to show off that they have the money to ruin not just carrots or celery, but shrimp:

And for those sadistic souls who want to make sure everyone has to confront the random-veggie-filled mold, rather than being able to comfortably ignore the one on the buffet bar, there's always the option to make an individual mold for each member of the party:

Won't everyone be delighted to have a lemon-pimiento-cucumber-celery mold plopped in front of them?

For cooks who get a case of the post-holiday-blues trying to figure out what to do with the leftovers, there's a mold for that too:

Turn the leftover chicken or turkey into Chicken-Macaroni Molds, and let the holiday spirit live on.

Here's hoping you get something better than a shiny, jiggly chicken salad in your stocking!