Southern Living: More Than A Southern Tradition
Growing up I always looked forward to checking the mail in our little black mailbox when my sister and I got home from school. It wasn’t because I was checking for any particular piece of mail, but because I wanted to be the first person to scope out the magazines. I loved looking through the clothing magazines and circling or highlighting my personal favorites. I would sometimes imagine myself on epic adventures like the models who were posing in front of a gorgeous landscape. There was one coveted magazine, however, that was the favorite, and I typically didn’t get to flip through until after my mother. That magazine was Southern Living.
Southern Living was first published in February 1966 by the Progressive Farmer’s Company. The front cover donned a brick house in Mobile, Alabama displaying a lawn of brightly covered Azaleas. The original printing highlighted Houston, Texas, southern furniture manufacturers, and party planning featuring chicken dishes. While we don’t necessarily see 1960’s dress patterns featured in the magazine anymore, the structure of it still remains. The main categories include home, travel, garden, and food all while keeping the core of celebrating Southern culture.
During the age of hummingbird cakes, cocktail meatballs, and quiche lorraine, my grandmother started her subscription to the magazine around 1975. She heard about the magazine through a mailed invitation. She joined for seventy-five cents per print and states she has “enjoyed every issue since then”. Recently I was able to come across the November issue of Southern Living from 1975. The cover featured a light yellow kitchen with party guests serving themselves over laminate countertops. The issue promoted a buffet kitchen, making place mats to match your china, built in sofas, and the perfect appetizer for Thanksgiving: shrimp. It was so neat to look through the pages and envision how my grandmother read the same magazine forty-eight years ago.
In 1977, Forbes named Southern Living “The Most Profitable Magazine in the US”. Right before the decade of big hair and walkmans, the Southern Living Annual Recipes issue was launched in 1979. Since then, there has been the Southern Living Cookbook that has been well used by households all over the south. If I do recall, there are a few of those stashed in the cupboard in my childhood home. While my mom missed out on the chicken spaghetti casserole and healthy turkey lasagna recipes in the eighties, she ended up becoming hooked on the brand in the nineties. During her first Christmas with my dad in 1993, a gift from my grandmother was found in my dad’s stocking. They had received a yearly subscription to the magazine that still arrives at her house to this day. In those pages she found inspiration for weeknight dinners and attributes a lot of her cooking skills to practicing with Southern Living recipes.
Later on, my aunts also received subscriptions and started religiously following the magazine in the late nineties and early two thousands. As time went on, another big milestone for the company was their 50th anniversary in 2016. This double issue included an essay road trip through the south, fifty house plans along with other unique gardens and decor, and numerous recipes including forty of their past favorite dishes. In person celebrations were hosted across the south including in Birmingham, Nashville, and Charleston. I remember sneaking a peak of this gigantic compilation when visiting back home from college and some of the photos were absolutely stunning.
Southern Living, of course, has hosted several events in person besides their 50th celebration. In fact, a group of us including my mother and grandmother were able to visit their inaugural Illumination Charleston event the first weekend of December in 2021. I was living a foodie’s dream getting to watch cooking demonstrations and meet editors of the company. In addition, I thoroughly enjoyed the discussions we had over the dinner table with my mom, grandmother, aunts, and cousins about our relationship to the magazine. It is certainly one piece of the puzzle that connects the ladies in the family. Illumination Charleston was the perfect girls’ getaway and I am certainly turning towards advice from Southern Living for planning our next girls’ trip to San Antonio in January 2024.
This past Christmas 2022, I was delighted to find my own Southern Living subscription in my stocking. While I probably should have stopped borrowing my mother’s Southern Living awhile ago, I feel like finally having my own subscription is a pillar for growing up in our southern family. I someday hope to have been a subscriber for thirty years like my mother or even close to fifty years like my grandmother. As I flip through the pages of the latest issues, I love seeing the diversity of voices shared throughout and hope to see this magazine represent all who call the south home in the future. Until then, the Newbill girls will be waiting at their mailboxes for their next Southern Living issue.