Tinsel: A Search for America's Christmas Present by Hank Stuever

From the Publisher

In TINSEL, Hank Stuever turns his unerring eye for the idiosyncrasies of modern life to Frisco, Texas, a suburb at once all-American and completely itself, to tell the story of the nation’s most over-the-top celebration: Christmas. 

Stuever starts the narrative as so many start the Christmas season: standing in line with the people waiting to purchase flat-screen TVs on Black Friday. From there he follows three of Frisco's true holiday believers as they navigate through the Nativity and all its attendant crises. Tammie Parnell, an eternally optimistic suburban mom, is the proprietor of "Two Elves with a Twist," a company that decorates other people's big houses for Christmas. Jeff and Bridgette Trykoski own that house every town has: the one with the visible-from-space, most awe-inspiring Christmas lights. And single mother Caroll Cavazos just hopes that the life-affirming moments of Christmas might overcome the struggles of the rest of the year. Stuever's portraits of this happy, megachurchy, shopariffic community are at once humane, heartfelt, revealing – and very funny.

TINSEL is a compelling tale of our half-trillion-dollar holiday, measuring what we we've become against the ancient rituals of what we've always been.

The Washington Post - Bryan Burrough

This is the consummate "Young Writer Discovers Middle America" book (or rediscovers, given that Stuever appears to be from Oklahoma, poor guy). By and large Stuever pulls it off, in part because he eschews (most) condescension and embraces these happy, bustling Christianized Texans for what they really are, not what he thinks they ought to be.

Publishers Weekly

Stuever, a Washington Post staff writer and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, has appeared on The View, The Today Show and NPR with his incisive commentaries. Following Off Ramp, he returns for another heartland safari, this time to observe Christmas celebrations in Frisco, Tex. He explains: “This book takes place over three holiday seasons (2006, 2007 and 2008) among three unrelated families who live in a new megaworld north of Dallas, a place that often seemed to have surrendered its identity to the shopper within.” His seasonal survey begins with Tammie Parnell, who runs a business decorating other people's homes. In the chapter “There Glows the Neighborhood,” he describes the “Trykoski lights,” a house decorated with 50,000 lights, and traces this holiday history back to 2004 when Carson Williams scored a million-plus Internet hits after synchronizing 16,000 lights to music. Stuever watches the 1.1 million-square-foot Stonebriar Centre mall being decorated at midnight. While single mom Caroll Cavazos shops with her family at Best Buy, the author has an epiphany (“I see it as Caroll sees it. Real lives are being lived here”), and later he goes with her to church and a potluck dinner gift-swap. With impeccable research and solid reporting, Stuever has written the gift book that keeps on giving—Christmas consumerism wrapped together with traditional family values. (Nov. 12)

Kirkus Reviews

Washington Post pop-culture writer Stuever (Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere, 2004) searches for the meaning of Christmas in the Texas heartland. In 2006 the author went to live in suburban Texas, with return trips in 2007 and 2008, to pursue the cultural meaning of Christmas in America. He tells the stories of three Christmas-obsessed Texans: Tammie Parnell, a mother of two who runs a holiday decorating business; Jeff Trykoski, a computer engineer who becomes a local celebrity each year as he decorates his house with nearly 50,000 Christmas lights; and single mother Caroll Cavazos, who, along with a mob of other bargain shoppers, camps out in a Best Buy parking lot the morning after Thanksgiving. The Dallas suburb that Stuever documents-Frisco, population 90,000-is a fairly stereotypical example of suburban sprawl, dotted with megachurches and stripmalls, with all the garish tackiness and consumerism that entails. Though the author aims to empathize with his subjects, he can't resist taking some shots, singling out shallowness for special ridicule. Parnell, for example, fantasizes about doing Christmas decorations for the Bush White House, but is absolutely clueless about the wars Bush is waging; after learning of an earthquake in China that killed some 10,000 people, Trykoski worried about whether the Chinese Christmas-light factories were destroyed; Cavazos, the ultimate American consumer, overspends on Christmas presents and attends a church that features a Starbucks in the vestibule. The mockery here is a bit obvious, perhaps, but it does have a certain wicked charm. The problem occurs when Stuever tries to raise the tone of the narrative-quotingstatistics about consumer spending or dwelling on the emptiness of suburban living-in an effort to transform the book into a more serious study. As a result of the tonal shifts, his sociological conclusions about the meaning of Christmas in America are somewhat muddled. A pleasant but uneven look at Christmas in suburbia. Author appearances in Houston, Dallas, Austin. Agent: Heather Schroder/ICM

Product Details

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Table of Contents