At Christmas 1967, the Baby Boom was over and its earliest members had reached the age of twenty-one, while the last group of boomers celebrated their third Christmas. The year gave us the Spaghetti Western with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and A Fistful of Dollars, while Katharine Hepburn went on to win a Best Actress Oscar for her role in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, which debuted that year. America was transfixed by the Summer of Love and dazzled by Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival. That same month, The Beatles released the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album.
The world was rapidly changing, but the holiday landscape reflected Christmas traditions of earlier boomer years for the latest members of the generation, born 1960-64. Nonetheless, the celebration of the season was tempered with the backdrop of a full-scale war, though undeclared, going on in a place most people couldn’t find on a map. Here are some numbers and facts about our Christmas of 1967:
Births
There were 3,520,959 births in the U.S. that year as the population rose to 203,713,081. Among the now-famous who celebrated their first Christmas that year are Julia Roberts, Will Ferrell, Laura Dern, Vin Diesel, Nicole Kidman, Kurt Kobain, Pamela Anderson, Jamie Foxx and a plethora of celebrities from all types of creative disciplines.
Vietnam
There were 485,600 troops stationed Over There. The Battle of Tam Quan was fought the first two weeks of December, resulting in 58 U.S. soldiers never celebrating another Christmas. In October of 1967, 100,000 people assembled at the Lincoln Memorial and around half of the protestors continued marching to the Pentagon in “The March on the Pentagon to Confront the War Makers.” In December there were protests against the Draft — with public burnings of Draft Cards — in San Francisco and New York. Anti-war protests increased into the next year.
Hot Toys of the Season
Spiro-Graph was named Toy of the Year by toymakers, but Milton Bradley’s Battleship game was the top seller. Other top sellers included Lite Brite, Matchbox cars, doll furniture and houses, Lionel train sets and Aurora slot car tracks, to name a few.
Dollars and Cents
Postage to mail a Christmas card first-class in 1967 was five cents. The average annual income was just over $17,000 and people spent approximately $340 each on Christmas gifts. By contrast, people are expected to spend more than $900 per capita this year, and it’ll cost 49ยข to mail a Christmas card.
Christmas of 1967 was an in-between moment for Mister Boomer. As a young teen he began to become aware of the surrounding world while embracing the music of the time; and it was the year he got his first pair of bell bottoms. It was to be a season of exuberant boomer family celebration as it had always been, though Mister B realized he wouldn’t be a kid forever.
Have yourselves a Merry Boomer Christmas! What was Christmas like for you fifty years ago, boomers?
Love the pic of Bob Hopeless and Ray-Quil Welch!