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If you think of a TV dinner as the software, then a TV tray is the hardware, a platform for everything from sliced turkey in gravy to chicken pot pie. TV trays, or TV tables as they are also called, were likely preceded by easily available...
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If you think of a TV dinner as the software, then a TV tray is the hardware, a platform for everything from sliced turkey in gravy to chicken pot pie. TV trays, or TV tables as they are also called, were likely preceded by easily available horizontal surfaces such as coffee tables, which were repurposed by the growing numbers of households who purchased televisions at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s. Manufacturers responded to the preference among new TV owners to dine by the light of a cathode-ray tube by churning out aluminum, fiberglass, and wooden folding TV tables (vintage wooden Scheibe Design tables are prized), which were often sold in sets of four that neatly stacked into a carrier or stand. Such sets may have appeared as early as 1952, while the "TV Dinner," as it was advertised by Swanson's, made its icy way into grocer's freezers by 1954. The designs on TV trays were even more varied than the materials from which they were made. Plains colors were not especially common, but floral patterns were, which is why so many trays were covered with flowers, leaves, pine cones, holly, and fruit such as strawberries, all of which hid spills and crumbs better than solid colors. By the 1960s, trays were decorated in paisleys and other pseudo-psychedelic designs, and by the 1980s, brands such as McDonald's, Thundercats, Smurfs, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and X-Men, popular on school lunch boxes, had made their way onto TV trays, an indication of the use of these pieces of portable furniture by babysitters looking for ways to distract the children they were being paid to supervise. And of course there were TV trays for special occasions such as Christmas, spawning trays bearing the likenesses of snowmen and Santa Claus.

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