SEASON'S READINGS: TINSEL

Every now and then you encounter a book that feels like it was written just for you.  When I discovered Hank Stuever’s Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present I knew it would become part of my annual Christmas reading list.  As the subtitle promises, the book is a thorough examination of the modern American Christmas experience at both the micro and macro levels.  Stuever, a journalist, spent three Christmas seasons in Frisco, Texas, a booming suburb outside of Dallas.  He focuses on three different families and follows them as they celebrate the holiday, delving into countless Christmas-related topics along the way.  Stuever happened to write the book during the economic downturn so it also becomes a chronicle of the haves, have-nots and everyone caught somwhere in the middle.

The book is exhaustive without being exhausting; the author maintains an easy, lightly comedic tone throughout while managing to cram in a lot of facts and figures.  He includes just enough of his personality without it becoming all about him, something I find fault with in a lot of non-fiction books of this type.  Instead the focus remains firmly on his subjects.  First up there’s Tammie, my favorite of the three, the affluent super-mom and wife with a side business decorating the homes of her fellow desperate housewives.  Next we have married couple Bridgette and Jeff, who have one of those “seen from space” Christmas light displays.  And finally there’s everywoman Carol (and her extremely bratty daughter), a church-going, lower middle class single mom just doing her best.

Via these three families Stuever tackles every aspect of Christmas that you can imagine.  He follows Carol’s role in a pageant at an obnoxious mega-church, attends craft fairs with Tammie and examines Christmas lights, decorations, charities, malls and everything in-between.  There is an emphasis on the retail side of the holiday, with chapters named after chain stores and a lot of time spent in malls, which is fine by mall-loving me.  When first reading the book I was especially thrilled to reach the section about Department 56’s light-up Christmas villages and the devoted “village idiots” who obsessively collect them (count me firmly among their number-- no surprise, I know).  No gaudily-decorated stone is left unturned and emotional heft is added via the trials and tribulations of the real people involved in all of the holiday hoopla.

Original Hardcover Edition 

The book appeals to me on many levels: the obsessive level of detail, the voyeuristic look into people’s lives and homes and of course Christmas, Christmas, Christmas!  Like the author, I straddle the line between cringing at people’s manhandling of the true spirit of the holiday and genuinely wanting to join in on the overkill fun.  Tammie best embodies this attract and repel dynamic:  her energy and enthusiasm is enviable but she also lives in a privileged, white-washed bubble world plagued by gossip and materialism.  One thing I’ve always found vaguely unsatisfying about Tinsel is that the author never reveals how the many conservative Texans he surrounded himself with reacted to him as a gay man. Perhaps the absence of this in the book suggests they simply ignored his sexuality altogether.  Glossing over things seems to be a shared skill in the city of Frisco.

I always make Tinsel the kick-off to my holiday season.  I like to start reading it on the plane ride as we go to visit family for Thanksgiving, for the book itself begins on Black Friday and unfolds over the course of the holiday season.  It gets me excited for the coming torrent of Christmas but also serves as a cautionary tale, a reminder to not behave like some of the more craven or clueless individuals that Stuever profiles.  And it also makes me laugh—a scene in which Tammie hires a professional elf-actor to surprise her kids with a ski trip announcement is delightfully awkward.  Tinsel really is the entire modern Christmas experience compressed into a single, highly readable book.