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‘Tinsel’ is a fun exploration of meaning of Christmas
(by Jennifer Alexander - December 09, 2009)
Discussing the meaning of Christmas is a tradition almost as old as Christmas itself.
Hank Stuever’s Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present is an amusing and insightful contribution to this persistent question.
In any exploration of holiday customs, it is easy to get lost in narrow views. On one hand are the overly sentimental, nostalgic tributes to Christmas past, with sanitized memories without a trace of conflict or sorrow.
On the other hand are scolding tirades about selfish consumer culture and the damaging effect of overspending and over-scheduling.
Stuever skillfully navigates between these two extremes. He is a frank and funny observer, unafraid to use sarcasm. He is also earnest and kind, seeking understanding rather than relying on a quick joke. Stuever’s refreshing book describes both the excesses and the genuine joys of the season. He explores Christmas and “our weird economy, our modern sense of home, our oft-broken hearts and our notions of God. The biggies.”
Stuever focuses his story on three unrelated families in Frisco, Texas. He chooses this growing suburb north of Dallas as a “perfect anywhere.” Stuever moves to Frisco for the 2006 Christmas season and returns in 2007 and 2008. Although he never loses his keen reporter’s eye, Stuever becomes a part of these families.
That this self-described member of the East Coast media elite is welcomed into the lives of red-state suburbia is a bit like a TV Christmas special.
In his acknowledgments, Stuever asks readers, “Would you be willing to let a stranger spend Christmas with your family? While he takes notes? Even when he asks how much you spent on everything? … And what if he stuck around a year longer than he said he would?”
Stuever meets Caroll Cavazos and her daughter Marissa before dawn in a Best Buy parking lot on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Caroll is a single mother who works for Bank of America and volunteers at Celebration Covenant Church. Stuever accompanies Caroll to her church, attends Marissa’s fourth-grade Christmas play and lets himself into their house on Christmas morning.
Jeff and Bridgette Trykoski live in a moderately priced subdivision where they install an annual light show in their front yard that brings hundreds of visitors every night. Stuever helps the family install lights, goes Christmas shopping with them and attends a pre-Christmas gift exchange with Jeff’s parents.
When Jeff explains that the display is intended to make people happy, Stuever remains mystified. But he tempers his skepticism with the story of the night the doorbell rang after the end of the light show. A woman said that her family had a terrible day and that seeing the lights would help. Jeff turned the lights on without complaint.
Tammie Parnell operates a seasonal business decorating houses for Christmas. She is a high-energy mother of two with a wistful longing for the ultimate Christmas moment. She charges by the hour, decorating one or two houses a day for clients who feel the pressure to “have Christmas up” but lack time or inspiration. “Are you ready to be my elf?” she asks Stuever. He accepts and is soon rearranging angels on the mantel, helping Tammie’s daughter make an ornament for a school assignment and dropping off her mortgage check at the bank when the Parnells go skiing.
Stuever reports on sad, strange, funny and tender moments. Caroll falls from the stage at her mega-church Christmas pageant and two women talk about their own sprains and breaks as Caroll suffers.
On a shopping trip with the Trykoskis, they encounter a weeping man being yelled at by his wife — a woman with smeared makeup looking green in the fluorescent light — and Christmas music blaring in the background. “David Lynch could make a Christmas movie in this Wal-Mart tonight,” Stuever writes.
When Tammie hires an elf to tell her children that Santa decided that the best present this year was not a laptop or a dirt bike but a trip to Vail for the whole family, the children sit in stunned silence and Stuever writes, “Blake is processing the words NOT a dirt bike.” At a Trykoski gift exchange, one gift provokes gleeful screaming, and “the room focuses wholeheartedly on Traci’s joy...Moments like this make a family a family.”
As Stuever examines the people of Frisco and how they celebrate Christmas, he eventually experiences the loneliness of missing his own Christmas. Tinsel does not conclude with a revelation that neatly ties up all loose ends. Instead, Stuever gives readers many laughs and much to ponder.
• Hank Stuever will discuss Tinsel at 7 p.m. Dec. 9 at the Center of Creative Arts, 524 Trinity Ave. Call 725-6555 for more information.
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