The Great Purgeal Vortex of 2014 continues unabated at our house. This weekend it unleashed its fury upon our unsuspecting and completely innocent kitchen. The that raged inside our kitchen cupboards and drawers revealed some unexpected treasures, mostly in the form of old cookbooks and recipe files inherited from my mother-in-law.
One file was filled with recipes found in booklets slipped inside baking products, ripped from magazines, and clipped out of cereal boxes. But the backside of a page of Christmas recipes torn from the December 1961 issue of the Ladies Home Journal contained a shopping list for Santa Clause for the Well-Equipped Home. For those of you planning a retro-themed Christmas for next December, the first half of your list is located at the top of this post. The second half is directly below.
Just so you know, my siblings and I did not grow up in a well-equipped home. At least not according to Ladies Home Journal standards. In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that Mom did have an electric hand mixer, but not one that hung on the wall. She also had cookbooks. But they were published by Betty Crocker, not Ladies Home Journal.
However, as a kindergartener in 1961, I coveted, coveted, coveted the milk shake mixer. But at $14.95 it wasn’t coming to our house. Neither were the travel items, as we didn’t travel much. And the portable oven and the camera “sufficiently light in weight and small in size to fit into a woman’s purse or a man’s pocket” were way, way out of reach for a school teacher’s salary.
The ad begs a couple questions, which you can respond to in the comment box:
- Which of these items made your home well-equipped in 1961?
- Do you think Don Draper or Peggy Olson from Mad Men came up with the idea for this ad?
