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MEMOIR ALLEY
Financing Christmas
When you are a kid in 1960
In 1960, a movie ticket cost 75 cents. A McDonald’s hamburger was 15 cents, 25 cents if you wanted fries. You could feed a family of five for a week for $20. A man’s suit cost $30 to $120, and a woman’s dress was $7 to $30.
If you were a kid in a working-class family and you could pool your money with your siblings and come up with $5 or $6, you could get decent Christmas gifts for Mom, Dad, Grandma, and Grandpa. Of course, each of them would get only one gift from all of you, but it wouldn’t be something awful.
I started this project one Christmas, and it became a tradition for as long as I was home. My sister, my brother, and I pooled our money together to buy gifts for the adult members of the family.
Standard gifts included sweet-smelling hand lotion for Grandma, Old Spice shaving cream for Grandpa, a carton of cigarettes for Dad, and maybe a piece of costume jewelry for Mom. I don’t remember what we did with any money we had left over — or even if we had any left over — but I assume we divvied it up among us siblings.
The adults appreciated our efforts. After all, it’s the thought that counts, and our thoughts were good ones for kids with little money. As for the cigarettes for Dad, in those days nobody knew the…
