Seven-year-old Bryan Parker played outside his Auburn home in the mid-afternoon sun with a new Nerf gun that was almost as tall as he was.

Rice Jones gassed up his 1973 Harley-Davidson 1250CC Sportster on Center Street and took it out for what he was pretty sure was the first Dec. 25 it had ever been on the road.

Sue Cushman-Gillen marveled at the weather from the Strawberry Avenue dog park in Lewiston. She’d grown up in Oxford and just returned to Maine after 30 years of living near San Francisco. 

“We’ve had two days where we’ve been warmer than there — I’ve been bragging on Facebook,” said Cushman-Gillen. “Everyone’s said, ‘Did you bring the weather with you?’ You’re darn toots I did.”

Darn toots, she did.

On Friday, around the Twin Cities there were short sleeves, skateboards, shorts and even, yes, flip-flops.

Merry Christmas, Maine.

It was record-breakingly warm: 62 degrees in Portland, according to the National Weather Service in Gray. That was 9 degrees higher than the previous record high set in 1994 and tied last year on Christmas Day.

Todd Lissner of Lewiston took a few hours to enjoy sitting in Kennedy Park in Lewiston. He’d seen the electronic Androscoggin Bank sign hit 56 degrees. The weather service measured a Lewiston high of one degree higher, 57.

“I think it’s awesome,” said Lissner, though it did feel a little off, holiday-wise. “Some (snow) would be OK — but snow and 35 degrees, not snow and 10 degrees.” 

Christopher Messier of Auburn took advantage of the warm weather to ride his bike across Longley Bridge, heading to his girlfriend’s house with a present for her clutched to his handlebars.

“It’s crazy; I wish there was snow,” Messier said. But bike riding, no question, was much easier this way.

Jones, of Auburn, said it hadn’t dampened his holiday cheer at all.

It felt like Christmas “this morning when the kids were opening their presents,” he said. “Now, they’re out playing with them. I figured I would go out and play, too.”

At the busy dog park, Sunshine Folsom, there with her service-dog-in-training, Maude, liked that the weather made it that much safer for families to travel and be with loved ones.

Andrea Lebrun-Johnson and her fiance, David Daniels of Lisbon Falls, were there with Sasha and General, rescue dogs from Mississippi who hadn’t yet seen a full Maine winter.

General had been a stray when he was brought to a shelter down South.

“Someone dropped him off at a Dollar General store in Mississippi,” Lebrun-Johnson said. “He was eating out of the trash.” Shelter workers had nicknamed him General because of that. The name stuck.

“He’s the best dog; he’s so sweet, so lovable,” she said.

The couple had just celebrated their first Christmas in their new home with the new pups and her young granddaughter.

“It was pretty wonderful,” Lebrun-Johnson said. “Christmas spirit was still there — just the Christmas temperature and weather were not there.”

Meteorologist Eric Schwibs at the National Weather Service said all was not so balmy in the forecast: He projected a high in the upper 30s on Saturday and a wintry mix of sleet and freezing rain into Sunday.

Several inches of snow were in the extended forecast for Tuesday. Schwibs expected it to warm up again after that.

“The jet stream has been bottling up all the really cold air in Canada,” he said. “Unless that changes, we’re going to stay above normal for the winter. It’s the seesaw. One day you’re in shorts and a T-shirt and the next day you’re in a parka. It’s an invigorating climate.”

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