Santa brought the celery!

Just to prove that I've always been weirdly obsessed with cooking guides, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. When I was a kid and my mom would get Woman's Day magazines, I loved to look at the monthly menus in them. I imagined how tedious it would be to have to stick to some magazine's idea of what you should eat every day, and I would try to see if there was ANY day when I would approve of every single item on the menu. (Being super-picky, there very rarely was.) So today I have exciting money-saving menus from Decembers in the 1970s.

I love this one from 1976 Woman's Day because Santa is making a special delivery:

Yes, he's got a giant bag full of celery, broccoli, bananas, and cauliflower. I'm sure he'll be reeeaaalll popular with the kiddoes.

Santa appears not to have gotten all that health-conscious himself, either. Here he is on the page with the actual recipes:

Yep-- he still gets cookies. I guess he's trying to protect the kids from all that sugar by eating their cookies and leaving them veggies.

A common theme in the December menus is that apparently "money-saving recipes" was code for "canned seafood with a starch." December 1976 featured these beauties:

 Potato-Clam Fritters! Canned minced clams, mixed with potatoes, egg, and flour, then fried. I'm 100% certain that menu would not have made my "acceptable" list.

The 1974 Woman's Day menu was a lot less colorful.

No Santa. No multicolored printing. Just black and blue, like the parents' finances felt by the end of the month. And of course, the way to save money was to mix canned seafood with a starch and fry it.

This month, it's tuna and rice with baking mix and egg. Probably slightly more likely to win the little-Poppy seal of approval than the potato-clam fritters, but only if the onions disappeared....

This month also featured a few "throw-it-all-in-the-oven" recipes.

How about "Luncheon Meat Oven Dinner (with Cheesy Succotash and French Fries)"? (The parenthetical note in the title makes me imagine this is one of Meat Loaf's lesser-known songs.)

In any case, the name is code for oven-fried Spam with frozen fries and succotash. Yay? I'm pretty sure the only part of this that little Poppy would have approved would have been the fries and the dessert of lemon sherbet with frozen strawberries.

This last recipe actually wasn't part of the menu list, but I saw it and wondered if this was the 1974 holiday equivalent of avocado toast, so it gets thrown in as well:

Nothing says the holidays have made mom lose  her mind quite like broiler-browned bananas on a bread raft with bubbly canned cranberry sauce. Happy Holidays! Now  you'd better get the celery out from under the tree before it wilts.