My parents were small children during the Depression, with my father being on a rural farm, and my mother living on the trolley line in a city, with her father (my grandfather) being a barber. Both of them say they didn’t have much of anything, old clothes, Christmas was an orange and a peppermint stick. But, my father never went hungry. There were near misses with my mother’s family, as far as being able to put food on the table. Neither of them really realized they were poor, since nobody they knew had any money, either.
Same with my parents. The depression didn’t hurt as bad as the drought. Luckily, they had canned and had smoked meat. I remember Mother telling us that one year they were all sick and no one even mentioned Christmas.
The Real World, in the depression