Have You Seen the Lights?: TFT Review of Tinsel by Hank Stuever

Christmas is that rare cultural phenomenon that appears to transcend barriers that separate us the rest of the year: race, gender, creed, geography, ethnicity, class, sexuality—all of it gets absorbed into the annual secular shopathon that culminates on December 25th.

As we gear up for the holiday season, who better to act as our Ghost of Christmas Present than Hank Stuever, self-described skeptic and member of the East Coast media elite? Stuever, a staff writer for The Washington Post’s Style section, has written a 300-plus page analysis of American yuletide habits interwoven with his own complicated holiday season feelings. The end result is Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present, a frequently entertaining, informative and laughter-inducing journey into the American consumer psyche. It’s a world of Wal-Marts, Best Buys, Olive Gardens, Targets and shopping malls with names like the “Stonebriar Center,” where Stuever logs countless hours learning to navigate “mallography.” The book’s very title and jacket cover, with a photograph of an excessively be-Christmas-lit house in the ‘burbs, plant seeds of the tidings within.

Stuever spent the entirety of Christmas Season 2006, as well as significant chunks of the two subsequent holiday seasons, living, exploring and shopping in Frisco, Texas. Population: 90,000; average annual household income: $93,000; average age: 31; retail space: more than 1.1 square million feet. It is amidst this shopping orgasm—or shopgasm, if you will— that we meet some of the book’s main characters: do-it-all mom and businesswoman Tammie Parnell, whose life’s work is to bring Christmas to all middle and upper-class suburbanites who are too busy to decorate their 4,000-square-foot homes and more than willing to fork over big bucks to get it done, and self-confessed computer geek Jeff Trykoski and his patient wife Bridgette. These two inhabit a one-story red brick home Jeff decks out with 50,000 lights every year, to the delight of many and dismay of some.

Throughout, Stuever drops cutting asides and makes jokes referencing his own skeptical take on the unmitigated holiday joy surrounding him. For readers unfamiliar with his style, he can come off as patronizing or snarky, and verbose rather than illuminating. An example of the former: “When Tammie says that strings of coral-like beads strung through plastic garlands or piled into golden cups or red glass vases on dining tables and sideboards will be, in her words, “huge this year, you are starting to see these beads everywhere,” I accept it without question.” And an example of the latter: “More than 70 million families own fake trees, which have gotten fancier, taller, fluffier, and more expensive. In 2006, 28.6 million real Christmas trees are sold in the United States, for about $1.2 billion, down from a recent peak of almost 33 million trees the year before. Between 9 and 10 million fake trees were sold this same year, and they will last an average of six Christmases before they are replaced.”

Even so, real emotion does filter through the snark, especially towards the latter half of the book. When he revisits Frisco in 2007, Stuever finds the Christmas routines still wassailing merrily along. That said, it is at this point in the story that the characters we’ve met previously become fully-formed people, shedding stereotypes we may have assigned them in earlier chapters. There are moments when the characters surprise us (as human beings often do), with their tenderness, realism and understanding that these holiday shenanigans are just part of one big game in which they are bit players.

When he returns to Frisco again in 2008, foreclosures and layoffs are mounting, and 401Ks disappearing, as they are nationwide. The sense that the easy credit era is over and never coming back settles then like a cloud over the book. Stuever notes that 2008 marked the first year in memory that holiday retail sales in the United States declined and by a fairly staggering 3 percent, or $8.7 billion less than was spent in 2006. A few months into 2009 brings the bankruptcy of General Growth Properties, the company which operates the Stonebriar Center, as well as 200 other American malls.

What is the meaning in all of this? Tinsel asks more questions that it answers. Clear-eyed and funny, Stuever paints our country’s famed conspicuous consumption in its gory detail, leaving the ultimate judgements—Is it morally right? Can it be sustained? Do these questions really matter?—to the reader.

Tammie’s husband, who works in retail, says his wife is “living in a bubble.” Stuever agrees, as will many readers. Christmas may be one giant pact with the devil of capitalist consumerism but if just 5 percentage of Americans ever decide to scale back their holiday shopping by even just several hundred dollars, the nation’s economy would sink faster than George W. Bush’s approval rating in his final months as president.

It’s true: Christmas is at our throats once again and at least for now, that’s right where we need it.

Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present. By Hank Stuever. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 352 pages. $24.