My father, a welder, was unemployed during the 1960 Christmas season. Since he hadn’t received a paycheck since late October, his children had accepted that Christmas would be lean. The scarcity of colorful gifts not withstanding, Christmas 1960 ended up being my all-time favorite.

Two weeks before the 1960 Christmas party, Mrs. Hestoffer, my third grade teacher in Oakland, paired pupils and asked each to bring a small gift to exchange. I was matched with an 8-year-old boy named Herman. He lived on High Street in a neighborhood stuck in abject poverty since the 1930s. Herman was ridiculed because he lived in a shanty with a dirt floor. During the winter months, his clothes smelled of creosote and smoke from a woodstove that burned green wood. Herman was the object of many painful comments.

“What happens in Herman’s shack when a burning piece of wood lands on the floor?” was a commonly heard question in the cafeteria line. “Nothing,” was the punch line, “because his floor is made of dirt.”

No matter how difficult Christmas would be for my two brothers, sister and me, unlike Herman’s family, at least we lived in a home with two parents, wooden floors and indoor plumbing. My mother empathized with Herman’s family because she had also known poverty as a child in Maine. She knitted a pair of wool mittens and socks for Herman. In exchange, Herman’s oldest brother whittled me a chickadee from a piece of basswood. The carved bird gift idea occurred to Herman when he thoughtfully noticed my picture on the classroom’s blackboard. I had been photographed standing behind my blue ribbon science fair project, a cardboard box filled with correctly labeled bird nests. In elementary school, I became known as the kid who liked basketball, birds, and Herman.

My father’s younger brother, John, owned the Chez Paree, a chic, prosperous Waterville nightclub, in the early 1960s. On Christmas Eve, he surprised my parents by arriving at our home with four gifts apiece for my three siblings and me. My uncle had no way of knowing that an hour earlier my two brothers and sister had joined me in opening one gift. I chose to unwrap the best present from my parents: a Mickey Mouse watch. The generous gifts from my uncle caused my father to cry for the first time in front of his children. Dad was a proud man who felt ashamed that he couldn’t provide for his family in the late months of 1960. His emotional struggle was one of those defining moments that in fortunate families strengthens bonds between children and parents. We were a close family before Christmas 1960 and closer after it.

Nearly 55 years have passed since my uncle showered his brother’s children with toys and dolls. What I remember most from that Christmas though is not what my uncle gave us but my father’s apologetic words: “I’ll make it up to you kids next year.” Like many Maine families in the early 1960s, we were poor but didn’t know it because everyone was equally poor in my hometown. Except for my Uncle John, who wore dapper clothes and drove a black Cadillac, no one I knew had much money.

My parents grew up in Maine during the Great Depression. In the late 1920s, as a 10-year-old boy, my father’s winter morning chore was walking the railroad lines to collect spilled coal from passing trains. The coal he carried home in a wooden orange crate helped heat his immigrant parent’s Waterville apartment. My mother grew up on a small Maine dairy farm without electricity or indoor plumbing. Each December, as a reminder of her humble upbringings, in lieu of tinsel, she stitched together strings of popcorn and strung them as Christmas ornaments across branches below the cardboard manger with Mary and Baby Jesus.

On Christmas morning, a colorful but poorly wrapped present stood out from the others under our tree. The gift was a mystery to everyone but me. My 5-year-old sister had outgrown her winter boots but my parents couldn’t afford new ones. Hidden in a shoebox under my bed was money I had earned the previous summer picking strawberries, green beans, and peas on a nearby farm. I withdrew $8 — nearly a week’s worth of wages at 25 cents/hour — from my shoebox bank and purchased a pair of boots for my sister. Knowing that boots would be a boring gift, I placed a tiny doll in each boot to make it appear more appealing.

What we lacked in presents that Christmas was soon forgotten in the excitement of a bountiful family dinner. An older cousin shared his poached deer with my family. The local game warden knew that my cousin was a poacher but he overlooked infractions of those who shot deer to feed their families. Instead, the warden focused on arresting poachers who profited by selling venison. While my dad dined on venison sirloins, my mother served her four children two venison mincemeat pies, canned green beans, fluffy mashed potatoes, and yeast rolls. We devoured both pies like a litter of hungry wolf pups.

My favorite Christmas gifts were Herman’s brother’s hand-carved wooden chickadee and a basketball hoop and backboard. Illuminated by headlights from the family vehicle on Christmas Eve, my father installed the basketball hoop on the garage. We christened the new backboard by shooting baskets in darkness and again on Christmas morning.

My other gifts included a sweater that my mother knitted (a keepsake), two shirts made on her sewing machine, a pair of knitted socks from a grandmother, and hand-me-down cowboy shirt that my deer-slaying cousin had outgrown. My frugal mother lived the words she often preached: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”

Of all my 1960 Christmas gifts, the one that had the most impact did not come wrapped. My mother’s love of backyard birds was a gift she unintentionally gave to me. Raiding my bank again, my gift to my mother was a 50-pound sack of birdseed. She mixed it with table scraps with each restocking of the bird feeder. The first documented cardinal in central Maine visited my mother’s feeder on Christmas Day 1960. She was so smitten with the bright red male cardinal that during dinners that winter my father often teased her about having a new boyfriend. I went on to enjoy a wonderful career as a wildlife biologist due in large part to a seed planted by my mother that Christmas.

Ron Joseph, of Camden, is a retired Maine wildlife biologist. 

More “From the Outdoors”

Moose: monarchs of the Maine woods, but for how much longer?

Inebriation in nature

Ron Joseph: A wildlife biologist reflects on Maine’s moose seasons

Ron Joseph: Surviving on a wing and a prayer

Ron Joseph: Maine’s expensive war on coyotes harms other wildlife

Are beavers a nuisance animal?

The incomparable raven: World’s second smartest creature?

A Midcoast miracle out of sight and almost out of this world