Christmas is now officially just around the corner, and here's a little companion piece to my recent Thanksgiving post. I lifted (and then colorized) the artwork above from the 1945 MCAS El Toro Christmas dinner menu shown below.
From nose art on bombers to mess hall murals to unit logos, a lot of fun artwork -- both professional and amateur -- was generated as part of the war effort. Today I'm sure this menu would have some benign clip art on the front. But in 1945 we got Santa with a lecherous gleam in his eye.
Once again, this menu comes from the collection of CSUF's Center for Oral & Public History. The food selections bear a striking resemblance to the Thanksgiving menu from that same year..
Does anyone else wonder why the reindeer has a spear sticking out of him? It seems fairly non-jolly and un-festive.
I cleaned up the back panel a bit in Photoshop and it still looks bad. It was damaged by one of those sticky "magnetic" or "magic pages" scrapbooks.
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Folks,... PLEASE don't use those things. However, if you already have family photos and momentos in one of those books, just leave them there for a couple decades until the glue dries up and they fall out. Otherwise, you're likely to damage the contents during the attempt to peel them off the pages.
