There's no side like molds for the holidays

I normally run a rainbow of gelatin salads for Pride Month. This year when I was searching for recipes, I found a couple salads that are plenty colorful all by themselves, but the colors are red, green, and/or white. Since so many LGBTQ+ people have to endure at least a few unenlightened relatives pretending their partners are just their roommates or griping about pronouns, I'm posting those multicolored holidayish/ rainbowish salads for a little boost of pride in December. (Yeah, I know it's really a stretch, but you're getting more jiggly salad madness out of this, so don't examine the premise too hard.) 

First up: If you have relatively good relatives (Ha!), Eggnog Cranberry Salad from Gracious Goodness! A Peach of a Cookbook (The Junior League of Macon, Georgia, first printing in 1981, though mine is from the 1985 third printing) has a festive rainbow-ish holiday feel.

The tart cranberry will be softened by the sweet and rich eggnog flavor. Hell, if you hold off on the celery and garnish with pecans instead of leaving them to get soggy in the mold, this might even be a reasonable addition to the dessert table for relatives who like a little kitsch with their eggnog.

If your relatives are sure to wear out their welcome pretty quickly, though, and you can't decide between the tomato aspic and the avocado mold-type recipes that often populate my June pride posts, you're in luck! There's an abbreviated rainbow in the Tomato-Avocado-Cheese Salad!

This red, white, and green-striped tower will look festive AND discourage guests from sticking around. I can't imagine too many people volunteering to help finish off 12-14 servings of congealed vinegary tomato juice, aging avocadoes, and be-mayo-ed cream cheese.

If there's a chance that Tomato-Avocado-Cheese Salad isn't gross enough, Recipes on Parade: Salads Including Appetizers (Military Officers' Wives Clubs, 1966) can come to the rescue with its own Avocado-Tomato Aspic.

While I acknowledge that this one is not quite as colorful--just lemon gelatin dissolved in tomato cocktail and flavored with pickle juice and brown sugar-- the hunks of celery, avocado, and green onion floating in it will also help make it a festive (and nigh inedible) red and green color.

If you still feel the need for an actual green gelatin mold to go with it, the Holiday Special might be an ideal partner.

It's mostly green from the lime gelatin and chopped gherkins, while the pimentos will give it little pops of red to complement the green (and the canned crushed pineapple will just hang out, making it kinda stringy and very vintage). You might even mold the Holiday Special right on top of the Avocado-Tomato Aspic if you want! The pickle flavor and passive-aggression should be enough to tie them together.

Happy (or at least bearable) holidays to all who celebrate!