Filed under: Fun Stuff, Crafts & Projects, Parties & Entertaining, Holidays
I'm feeling nostalgic for tinsel this year, even if it's one of the tackiest Christmas decorations around.I'm a December baby, one of those ill-fated children that grew up sharing their birthday with Christmas. It wasn't that bad -- I wasn't born on Christmas Eve; my birthday is three weeks before, on the 10th. Just close enough that my family and I often went out to select a Christmas tree sometime during my birthday weekend. My sisters and I would nibble on pigs in blankets and fight over which ornament to hang first as Mom and Dad arranged the lights. And all of the excitement made it easy to forget that there was leftover Carvel ice cream birthday cake in the fridge.
I might have sulked about all of it if I didn't love Christmas so much. My birthday was the gateway to Christmas, the beginning of an endless loop of "Jingle Bell Rock," the woodsy smell of Fraser Fir, and, best of all, tinsel.
The writer's tree, covered in tinsel. Photo: John Vargas
Yes, tinsel. Tinsel, in case you don't know, looks like long strands of glittery silver linguine or sparkly pom-pom fluff. The packaging sometimes refers to tinsel as "icicles," since it clings to a tree the way ice would... if your Christmas tree was outside in snowy temperatures.
Some people love their tree topper. Others have a special relationship with a childhood ornament they made or a tree skirt that grandma knitted. But my favorite part of decorating a Christmas tree is covering it with tinsel. Every year until I went away to college we hung tinsel on our Christmas tree.
And it's beautiful. When a tree is covered with tinsel and then illuminated with light, the tinsel's reflective surfaces bounce the light around and make the tree look like it belongs in the Magic Kingdom. It literally sparkles. As a kid I felt like a Christmas tree wasn't complete until it was covered in thousands of strands of silver.
Tinsel was a fairly common Christmas decoration when I was growing up on the east end of Long Island. But somewhere along the way, it got really, really uncool. Between Martha Stewart's envied, oh-so-perfect Christmas trees to the surge in stylish trees lit with white lights and monochromatic ornaments, tinsel started to make a tree look cluttered and unkempt. Even worse, dated.
Hanging tinsel is an old tradition. Invented in Germany in the early part of the 19th century, tinsel was originally made of pressed strands of real silver. My great grandparents, who immigrated to New York from Munich in the early 1900s, used tinsel to decorate their tree, and the tradition was passed down to my grandfather, my mother and then me.
The writer's mother and siblings with their tinsel-covered tree (left), and her grandfather (right) with her mother (forefront) and siblings with another tinsel tree. Photo: Courtesy of Diane Strecker Foster
My grandfather, William Strecker (above right), took hanging tinsel very seriously. He was a painter, which made him a student of light, and I can imagine that tinsel took on a sculptural quality that he could appreciate. He passed away when I was 12, but he taught my mother and her seven siblings the technique that his parents taught him: Hang tinsel from branches one strand at a time -- not in clumps -- and start from the bottom of the tree. The idea was to build thin layers of tinsel, so ultimately it looked like a cascading waterfall of silver. "He'd line us up like his foot soldiers and hand us one strand at a time to put on the tree," my mother told me. "I tried to do that with you girls, but at some point it got to be too much. I'd hand you girls clumps to hang in single strands, and you'd want to just plop the whole thing on the tree."
Tinsel certainly has its drawbacks. Unlike garland, which is more of a decorative tinsel wreath strung on a cord, tinsel sticks together with static electricity as you try to hang it. It's not uncommon to brush by a tree draped in it and end up with a strand stuck to your back. When removing ornaments and packing them away for next year, it often sneakily wraps itself around hooks and into packing boxes. Since picking each strand off the tree could take hours, you typically carry the tree outside for pick-up with all of it still on, which creates a mess of its own. Plus, if ingested by small animals like cats, it can be deadly.
My family tired of cleaning up tinsel so much in the weeks after Christmas that one year I remember Mom declaring that she was done with the silvery strands altogether. The following year, we covered our tree in white lights and monochromatic ornaments. Very Martha.
For all of my love of tinsel, I forgot about it entirely for several years. I covered my tree with rainbow-colored lights, glittery red, green and gold balls, teardrop-shaped ornaments in fuchsia, purple and blue, strands of blue and aqua metallic beads. I love a colorful tree!
This year, when we finished decorating our petite tree, I stood back and stared. "Something is missing," I told my husband, John. He didn't see it, so I asked my 9-month-old baby Harper, who couldn't stop staring at the lights, what he thought: "Da-da-da-da," he said, his pointer finger stroking a branch of the tree. It seemed like he was reaching for something, something that wasn't there.
That's when it hit me. We forgot the tinsel. and we had forgotten the tinsel every year before this one.
The writer with her husband in front of their Christmas tree. Photo: John Vargas
I thought of how excited I used to get when Mom would open up the tinsel packaging and hand us clumps to hang on the tree. I thought of how the light danced around the room and how tinsel would hang from the lower branches and touch our Christmas presents on Christmas morning. I loved that tinsel brought our family together; it was like frosting on a cake -- sure, it was sweet without it, but not nearly as good.
And suddenly, all I wanted was tinsel. I wanted Harper to see the flickering lights in it, and I wanted him to look forward to it each year as much as I used to. I wanted it to stick to his feety pajamas on Christmas morning, I even wanted to find it in the house three months later and smile at the memory of Harper opening his presents.
Maybe it's because I was nuzzling my baby's neck that day. Maybe it's because we're all collectively wishing we could return to simpler times. But suddenly, the only thing I wanted to do was to recreate my childhood Christmas tree in my very grown-up living room. (I knew I'd have to be careful -- if harmful to small animals, I can imagine it could do some damage to Harper's sensitive little belly if he ever managed to get a piece in his mouth.)
After an exhaustive search, I finally spotted tinsel at the Kmart in the East Village of Manhattan and grabbed a few 99 cent boxes. That night, John and I stayed up late to hang the tinsel on the tree. John, who had never hung it before, seemed amused by it all, but wasn't sold on a tree smothered in silver strands. I was halfway through hanging the first box when he turned to me: "You really want to cover the tree in this stuff? Isn't it kind of ugly?"
I held a strand like mistletoe over his head and gave him a peck on the cheek. Ugly or not, messy or not, retro or not, I love tinsel. It's like the smell of a turkey roasting on Thanksgiving or the sound of glass clinking on New Year's Eve. It's just part of Christmas, just as it should be.
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