A sixtieth is usually opened in front of a room and often sits just before retirement, so it wants one keepsake with a clear reason attached rather than three safe things, and it should not assume Dad has already stopped working.
Two things make a sixtieth different from every birthday before it, and both of them change the gift rather than the budget.
The first is that it is almost always opened in company. The second is that it lands within a few years of retirement, which is a subject he may be looking forward to or may be avoiding, and you do not always know which.
What was happening the year he was born
A dad turning 60 this year was born in 1966. Not a rounding: it is this year’s calendar in Brisbane minus 60, worked out when the page was built, so it is still right next year when everything else on a page like this has quietly gone stale.
- In Australia that year. Australia changed to decimal currency on 14 February 1966, retiring pounds, shillings and pence.
- The car. The Holden HR in April, then Ford’s XR Falcon in September: the first Australian Falcon you could order with a V8, and the 1966 Wheels Car of the Year.
- Number one. Friday on My Mind, the Easybeats, number one from 24 December. Kent Music Report, compiled retrospectively.
- What a week’s work paid. The federal basic wage was $32.80 a week, the first one quoted in dollars.
Which puts his teenage years in the 1980s, and that is the more useful fact of the two. The picks below come from the eighties dad page rather than from an age bracket, because taste formed at fifteen is what a gift has to hit.
It is opened in public, which changes what works
A gift opened at a party is doing two jobs: it has to please him, and it has to make sense to a room that does not know the backstory. That is why the sixtieth is the birthday where a keepsake genuinely earns its place, having been the wrong answer at every earlier one.
The rule is that the reason has to be sayable in one sentence. If you can hand it over and explain it in the time it takes him to get the paper off, it works. If it needs a paragraph, it is a private gift and should be given privately.
Do not assume Dad has retired
Retirement jokes at sixty are a coin flip. Plenty of men at sixty are years from stopping, some by choice and some not, and a card about endless golf can land on a man who has just been told his role is being restructured.
Give him the gift for the life he has now. If retirement is genuinely imminent and he is genuinely pleased about it, that is different, and you will know.
What not to buy for a 60th
Anything that requires him to learn a new app to use it. Not because he cannot, but because a present should not come with homework.
A photo book with no captions. The photographs are the easy part; the names, the years and the places are what make it worth keeping, and they are the part everybody skips.
Another engraved decanter. He has one. It came from the last milestone.
The shortcut is the decade Dad was fifteen in
That single fact is more useful than his age, his job or his hobbies, because it tells you which references land and which ones are somebody else’s childhood.
The decade page below is this catalogue read through that question.
