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.

SEASON'S READINGS: STRANGERS AT THE FEAST

2010 Hardcover Edition 

Thanksgiving really does generate the least media of the Big Three holidays.  There are a fair amount of Thanksgiving-themed TV episodes but only a handful of movies, books and specials, especially in comparison to the seemingly endless amount of Halloween and Christmas content.  This year I went on the hunt for Thanksgiving reading material outside of picture books and cozy mysteries.  I was excited to stumble across Jennifer Vanderbes' Strangers at the Feast, a novel that takes place entirely on Thanksgiving Day.  The cover copy made it sound like your typical, pseudo-literary dysfunctional Connecticut family story but it ultimately had a bit more going for it than the jacket suggested.

The book (Vanderbes' sophomore effort) follows the course of one Thanksgiving Day as the upper-middle class Olson family gathers together for the holiday.  The characters are interesting, if not a bit predictable.  There's the unmarried, freewheeling professor daughter taking a stab at adult responsibility by both adopting a mute girl from India and hosting Thanksgiving for the first time.  We  also have a money-hungry brother, his resentful wife and their three kids, with the whole family teetering on financial ruin despite their lavish lifestyle.  And finally there are the parents the slightly helpless homemaker wife and mother and the remote, Vietnam vet father.

The novel is well-written and contains a lot of details that root it in the real world, something I always appreciate.  The characters are realistic; my favorite was Denise, the angry wife and daughter-in-law who never the less keeps up appearances.  Most of the book, told in chapters alternating between the various characters' perspectives, is made up of flashbacks exploring the histories of the various characters before cutting back to their present-day interactions during Thanksgiving.  If that's all this book had to offer it would have been a major and cliched disappointment.  The whole dysfunctional WASP family thing, even when done well, has been done to death.  Luckily there was a suspense element that made it a more enjoyable, if imperfect read.

2011 Paperback Edition

Along with the Olson family there's one more key character: Kijo, an African-American teen from a housing project in Stamford.  From the epilogue on we get cryptic hints that some sort of violent tragedy befalls the Olsons on Thanksgiving; obviously it involves Kijo, as he heads out early in story to enact mysterious revenge against at least one member of the family.  The suspense element of how exactly this is all going to play out is intriguing, but my biggest complaint about the book is that the big, built-up event doesn't happen until the last 40 pages or so of the book.  It's like writing a 350 page novel about the Titanic and not having the boat hit the iceberg until page 300.  I don't suffer from bloodlust or anything but again, it's this element of violence that makes this book something a bit more than your average neurotic family story and the payoff, while pretty satisfying, comes way too late in the game.

I do also have to give a shout-out to the author's cringe-worthy child dialogue.  Creating realistic-sounding children in novels is a very difficult task; I almost take for granted when a child speaks in a book that it will sound terrible.  Luckily the kids don't play a big role in the story (at least one of them is mute) but the little dialogue they have is pretty bad, even by my low standards.  The best-worst example comes while two of the twins are playing explorer and have this to say about their grandmother: "The Westportians are known as a peaceful people.  They are gardeners and stargazers and drinkers of wine."  Oh yeah, that's exactly the sort of insightful, slightly biting critique that rolled off my tongue at age 9.  There is an element of literary pretension at work here, as also evidenced by the author's painfully earnest, oh-so-serious jacket photo.


Pacing issues and these small quibbles aside, this was a quick and entertaining read and certainly satisfied my hunger from some Thanksgiving fiction.  The holiday makes for a great backdrop and you get a lot of scenes of preparing the meal, eating the meal, debates about watching football and family woes in the context of holiday togetherness.  If you're looking for not just a good Thanksgiving read but a pretty good book in of itself, join Strangers at the Feast.

SEASON'S READINGS: TEN LITTLE WITCHES

Just yesterday I was talking with my friend Jackie (fellow member of the Sleepy Hollow gang) about the joys of media tie-in novels.  Like me, she never read very many growing up but she finds herself jonesing for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fix and is interested in the many spinoff novels.  Buffy also led me down the rabbit hole of tie-in novels, which exist for lots of shows, including some unexpected ones.  Full House alone had four separate series and a total of 92 books! 

For a continuity hound like me books of this type are a welcome addition to the mythos, especially when a show has been cancelled and is dearly missed (Buffy!) as the books provide the sense that the characters and their world are still evolving.  Because they’re written by a variety of authors, books of this nature tend to vary wildly in terms of quality.  Some are truly enjoyable and the author nails the tone and characters. And sometimes they miss the mark completely. 

One excellent thing about TV tie-in novels is that you can usually get used, extremely cheap (like under a dollar cheap) copies online.  And almost all of the respective series have lots of holiday-themed offerings.

So far I’ve loved the three Sabrina the Teenage Witch novels that I’ve read, all of which were holiday-based.  Ten Little Witches goes the extra mile because not only is it a Halloween-themed Sabrina novel, it’s also based on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (aka Ten Little Indians), one of my favorite mysteries.  It’s a glorious, slightly messy mash-up of all my favorite things!  Don’t ask me why I love the “people trapped in a house get murdered one by one” scenario SO much.  But I do.  I truly, truly do.

This novel takes place in Sabrina’s fifth season, her freshman year of college.  Season 5 actually has a Halloween episode, thereby making the events of this book impossible, but sometimes it’s best not to think too hard about these things.  Besides, with Sabrina you can always just explain everything with: magic!  Anyhoo, Sabrina and her mortal ex-boyfriend Harvey are invited to a mysterious Halloween party at a hotel in the magical Other Realm.  Suspicious of the mortal-friendly invitation, her witch-aunts (and their talking cat Salem) forge an invitation and tag along.

Once at the hotel the gang meet several other mortal-witch pairs along with a mysterious proprietor, a manic maid and a suspicious chef.  Unfortunately because this is a YA novel nobody actually gets murdered, but instead the guests get turned into toy mice one by one.  It’s lame, I know, but you still get the drama of people disappearing and plenty of suspects.  And, true to the spirit of the show, things get really weird.  Really, really weird.  Here is a partial listing of the weirdly incongruous things that play a role in this book: MIT professors, a red feather, the ghost of a dog, not one but two cross-gender characters, and the Salem Witch trials.

It’s all pretty light on Halloween elements; other than taking place on Halloween and some candy apples it’s really more of a mystery.  However in terms of satisfying Sabrina fans this book pays off in a major way.  It’s rich in continuity, with references to tons of semi-obscure events from episodes of the show.  As an added bonus, the character of Aunt Irma plays a significant role.  Aunt Irma was a one-off guest role played by Barbara Eden.  So I found myself reading a Halloween magic Agatha Christie Sabrina novel while picturing Barbara Eden as one of the characters. It’s a glorious pop culture bonanza!

SEASON'S READINGS: WEIRDO HALLOWEEN

Let me start this post with a tragic confession: I read just one Goosebumps book when I was a kid. It was titled You Can’t Scare Me! and featured some awesome swamp monsters on the cover.  My parents bought it for me at a local bookshop during a day trip to Carmel.  To say my family was big on reading is about as under an understatement that you can make but, as with television (no Simpsons, no Roseanne) and food (no fast food and just one piece of Halloween candy a day!), my mom had standards for books.  We were still in the car driving home when she had a fit of buyer’s remorse and informed me that this was the first and last Goosebumps book I’d be reading.

You always remember your first.

So I lived out the rest of childhood lustily staring at the (amazing!) covers of my classmates’ Goosebumps books.  I later watched the live-action show, absorbing many of the storylines that way, but a Goosebumps-sized hole stayed with me for years.  A couple of years ago I decided to make up for lost time and started getting the books from the library.  I tend to read them mostly in October but occasionally I’ll indulge in a summer camp themed installment (of which there are many) in June or July.  A Halloween-themed Goosebumps book is an even greater treat—it’s like the cronut of 90s kid lit (not that I’ve actually had a cronut, but you get my drift).

I’ve already read both Attack of the Jack O’Lanterns and The Haunted Mask so this year I turned to Weirdo Halloween.  Weirdo Halloween is a relatively recent addition to the mythos, part of an offshoot series focused around HorrorLand.  About 99% of the Goosebumps appeal is in the cover art so let me take a moment and examine it.  We’ve got an orange midget alien and a giant bag of Halloween candy.  Perfection! 

Approved!

As for the story… eh, not so much.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have particularly high standards when it comes to books written for an 8 year old demographic.  But a lot of them are surprisingly good even if way too many suffer from the whole “everyone is an alien!” twist ending.  Seriously, a lot of the books end with people turning out be aliens.  Weirdo Halloween promised aliens from the cover onward, however, so I knew what I was getting.

Our heroine Meg is of the typical, personality-free Goosebumps variety, along with her equally cipher-like brother.  En route to a friend’s Halloween party they help free a costumed kid trapped in a bush.  Later the party is mysteriously stink-bombed (it gets weirder).  When they return home the kid from the bush, who is actually—wait for it—an alien named Bim from the planet Weirdo shows up.  He says he stink-bombed the party as a sign of his gratitude and is now staying by their side FOREVER. 

Bim goes from annoying to psychotic, destroying Meg’s precious doll collection and forcing her to give him backrubs in a very creepy, molesty manner.  Really, there are detailed descriptions of her hands on his scaly, lumpy skin as he demands “more back rubs!”   Bim also regurgitates a partially-digested dead squirrel.  And then comes the book’s most horrifying moment: he sticks a piece of dead squirrel flesh IN HER MOUTH.  Yeah, I don’t get it either but I assure you it was disgusting.

Eventually the kids and their elderly babysitter Penny (the best character by far) drive Bim off first by insulting him repeatedly (it makes him shrink) and then reuniting him with his lost toy, which is why he was on Earth in the first place.  The end… or is it?

It’s not.  Weirdo Halloween is labeled a “Special Edition” meaning it’s twice the size of your average Goosebumps book.  So the ghostwriter (I’m assuming it’s a ghostwriter, anyway), rather than just write a longer story, has poor Meg get rid of Bim only to be randomly teleported to HorrorLand and engage in a totally unrelated second adventure.  Now she has to chase her brother and her evil twin doppelganger around the creepy amusement park and prove that she is the real Meg.  The highlight?  Meg and her evil twin almost drown in a giant pumpkin pie, complete with whipped cream.  After taking care of her evil twin Meg returns home only to find… her evil twin!  The last line is “How did you get in my room?”

The ending was so abrupt I thought I had a defective copy that was missing some pages but nope, that’s it.  Whoever wrote this just ran out of steam and I can’t really blame them; after coming up with a drowning via giant pumpkin pie anyone’s brain would be understandably drained.

 Read It, Skip It, Own It?

You can't really go wrong with a Goosebumps book; even at their worst they are a fun diversion.  But since there are so, so many books in the series to choose from you can skip this one in favor of one of the better Halloween offerings such as Attack of the Jack O’Lanterns or The Haunted Mask.