Christmas begins: Peter Pan recipe for peanut butter cookies

Happy first day of December!

Now that it's the Twelfth Month¹, the holiday season is officially under way, as far as I'm concerned. (I'm not a fan of all the businesses that kicked off Christmas in late October or before Thanksgiving.)

I have a sackful of Christmas-themed ephemera — postcards, recipes, illustrations, greeting cards and more — to post this month, so it's a great time to get started.²

To start, here's a vintage and festive recipe sheet for peanut butter cookies from Peter Pan. My educated guess is that this dates to the early 1970s; I found some similar Peter Pan advertising copy (with the same mention of "Scrooges"), in a December 1971 newspaper. I'm sure that this style of glass jar and Peter Pan label could also help us date this piece.³

Here's the cookie recipe from the paper...

• 1 cup shortening
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 cup Peter Pan
• 2 cups sifted flour
• 2 teaspoons soda
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 5 dozen (about) peanuts

Cream shortening, sugars, eggs and vanilla. Stir in Peter Pan Peanut Butter. Sift dry ingredients, stir into creamed mixture. Shape 1 teaspoon of dough. Press into slim S-shape and place on ungreased cooky⁴ sheet. Insert peanut in end of dough. Press dough with back of fork to make criss-cross. Bake in 350° oven about 10 minutes. Makes about 5 dozen cookies.

Footnotes
1. And you can't spell twelfth without ELF.
2. If you want a sense of what's ahead in the coming weeks, here's the Guide to Papergreat's Christmas 2011 posts.

3. According to Wikipedia, Peter Pan peanut butter, which dates to 1920, was originally packaged in a tin can with a turn key. During World War II, the packaging switched to glass jars because of metal shortages. And in 1988, again according to Wikipedia, Peter Pan became the first brand of peanut butter to be packaged and sold in plastic jars.

As an additional aside, I am a huge peanut butter addict and, currently, my favorite brand of PB is Peter Pan's 100% natural creamy honey roast. (It's a little obscure, and I fear they won't continue this particular line forever. Hoarding might be an option.)
4. Cooky? Suddenly they're using a Middle Scots spelling of the word?