Featured 1958 XMAS book ...amusing tips!

Got this 1958 book at the Goodwill last year.



Some holiday decor ideas!



A list of the chemicals they suggest.
(Disclaimer: Don't try this in 2020!)




A few recipes...





For a Mid-Century holiday look:







Thought I'd share some of my favorite pages.

Happy Holidays Everyone.

 

Oh, that looks like fun! Except the chemicals...

 

Made me laugh! Especially the table.

 

And the mobile for the dining room. Makes me want to go out and get a branch right away.

 

I hung snowflakes on my dining room light fixture, to be fair. The gelatin salad looks like food. NOT.

 

Thank you for sharing that. I love the old books that show these ideas and recipes.

 

I gave up after seeing celery. I’m not brave enough to mix pineapple and celery (or throw any chemicals into an indoor fire). Cool book, though!

 

Lol!!! Imagine going to your friends house for Christmas dinner and she has a decorated tree branch just hanging above her table, the smell of flaming borax is making everyone a little giddy for her celery eggnog flavored sweet potato balls. Ah the 50s. No wonder my mom is a weirdo. Lol

 

Snowflakes are traditional Christmas. A bare branch with gray blobs, red balls and a black ribbon not so much.

 

Yeah, that is amazing) So old and so actual

 

LOL... the treasures of decorating and entertaining in 1958!

I was born in 53 and my folks had gotten married a few years prior and moved into a new home. Dad chose the colors for interior paint. Burgundy-eggplant purple for the living room walls with giant splashy jungle print curtains in white, greens and burgundy. They were on a very limited budget... and Dad cut huge, beautiful, elaborate snowflakes out of white paper. Candles with holly and berries, sleighs and winter snow scenes, Santa and reindeer... they taped them up on the walls. It is one of the very first things I remember about Christmas! My sister still has them...
Leslie

 

That is a sweet memory Northern Lights.

 

The flaming pinecones remind me of a misadventure my brother and sister had one '50s Christmas. The folks were out of town, so siblings had a forbidden teen party. They lit a fire in the fireplace, but no one told them about opening the flue first. The flames went up the wall instead and lit Mom's pine come wreath on fire. It exploded and burned holes in the carpet. Needless to say, everyone involved was grounded, and had to pay for getting the burn spots rewoven.

 

I think the red and black are simply because the booklet is a 2-color print job on the inside. I doubt they were suggesting black as a good decorating color for Christmas

 

OMG, I'm glad it wasn't worse! Sounds like fun up until that point though.

 

What a fun story! Those crazy kids!

 

@Darkwing Manor OH yikes!!! Leslie

 

That’s never a good idea!
I came home from work one day to find that my OH had gone shopping for kitchen paint and he let a three year old choose the colour. When I said pale green I had ideas of classy country sage or a delicate duck egg colour. I did NOT envisage bright effing pea green. He did something similar in the bathroom of the previous house where ‘coral’ turned out to be an eye-wateringly flaming orange. He couldn’t even blame a child that time but he hasn’t picked a paint colour since .

 

No one else had a flaming orange bathroom on the whole block. Bright pea green sounds rather appropriate for a kitchen. Little kids like BRIGHT colors. Voice of experience. You should have seen the bedroom wallpaper I picked when I was five or so.(LOL) OTOH I still liked it when we took it down decades later.

 

I forgot to add he painted one wall of the kitchen and the whole bathroom before I saw it . Sitting here I can still see the pea green peeking out from under nice sage green paint on a spot where it went onto the coving.