A Farmhouse Christmas: My Favorite Memories from Growing Up in Rural Maine

One of our Christmas trees in the 1970s — tinsel for days, gifts piled high, and the old television that took a good five minutes to warm up. This photo feels like stepping straight back into my childhood.

I grew up in the Maine Highlands, one of five children on a fifty-acre farm my parents bought before I was born. The house had been empty for at least a decade by the time they moved in, and “rustic” doesn’t even begin to cover it. There was no indoor plumbing, no hot water, and the kitchen boasted a slate sink with a hand pump. The only bathroom option? A two-seater outhouse in the attached shed leading to the barn. (Luxury, I know.)

My father eventually renovated the house to create a real bathroom and added bedrooms upstairs. Even then, we didn’t get hot running water in the summer until I was in high school and they installed an oil furnace. Winters were warmed with a wood cookstove in the kitchen and a wood furnace in the basement — which also meant if the fire wasn’t going, neither was the hot water.

My mom stayed home until I was in high school, and my dad worked as the caretaker for another local farm. They were both hard workers, and they made sure we were too. We didn’t have much money — something I never noticed as a kid — but we had all the things that made a family rich: love, laughter, time together, and a comforting sense of this is home.

And Christmas? Christmas was pure magic.

Every year, we went to bed with an empty tree. But we never worried. During the night, “Santa” always came. My parents stashed gifts for months and worked hard to make Christmas morning feel abundant. And they succeeded every single year.

Me as a toddler, absolutely thrilled with my stocking on Christmas morning. Tinsel, paper chains, and pure childhood joy — this is exactly what Christmas felt like in our farmhouse.

One of my favorite memories comes from when my younger sister and I convinced my mom to let us hang our stockings on the ends of our beds. I was probably eight; she would’ve been six. We kept the bathroom light on as a nightlight, and sometime in the very early hours, one of us woke the other. (I blame her. She’d blame me. But I know it had to have been her.)

We thought it would be brilliant to dump our stockings out on our beds, then sneak to the bathroom to inspect each treasure under the bright light. Back and forth we tiptoed, giggling like we were pulling off a covert military operation — which, in hindsight, is probably what woke up our parents.

Footsteps. Panic.

I dove back into my bed and pulled the covers over my head. My baby sister? She bolted into the bathroom and hid… in the shower. The shower with the light on. The opaque shower door where you could see her outline perfectly. Unsurprisingly, we were busted.

My mother marched us back to our room, made us repack our stockings, and laid down very strict instructions not to get out of bed again until morning. The next year, the stockings went back on the couch where they belonged.

Christmas morning itself was an event. My mom was a stickler for handwritten thank-you notes, and with seven people in the family, that meant our gift-opening pace could generously be described as “glacial.” Each person opened a gift, announced who it was from, and waited while my mother wrote it down. My dad played Santa, passing presents out one at a time. I’m fairly certain it took us hours to get through everything.

But one year stands out.

My mother had just opened a gift when she suddenly started shouting, “Wait! I can’t find my pen! Nobody open another gift until I find my pen!” We all froze. Then my older sister started laughing so hard she nearly fell off the couch.

Because the pen?

The one my mother was convinced had vanished?

It was in her mouth.Clamped right between her teeth while she yelled around it.

It became one of those stories we told every single Christmas, and it still makes me smile.

My mom went to meet Jesus almost seventeen years ago, and I miss those Christmas mornings more than I can say. Back then, I had no idea how little we had materially. All I saw was how rich we were in love. And now, looking back, I see what a gift that really was.

Those years taught me something I still carry today: Christmas isn’t about what’s under the tree or making sure the gifts are perfect. It’s about family. It’s about the moments you can’t wrap, the laughter that fills a room, and the memories that linger long after the wrapping paper is gone.

And most of all, it’s about the greatest gift ever given — the gift God sent over two thousand years ago when He gave us Jesus. That’s the heart of Christmas. The most perfect gift of all.