ABAW December Edition

On our trip to New Mexico, we upheld our Christmas tradition of reading Cornelia Funke’s When Santa Fell to Earth by listening to the audiobook version, beautifully read by Funke herself. I’ve commented about this book before. I can attest that the book becomes more magical and poignant for me each time we read it. 

The other book I finished in December was also a Christmas story.

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

This is not a book I would have picked up on my own, but my friend Vicki gave it to me and I couldn’t resist her recommendation. I started reading it in New Mexico, with Christmas lights blinking over my head, football games flashing on the tv, and the people I love most in the world gathered nearby. 

Stuever, a pop-culture writer for the Washington Post, spent three Christmases observing Frisco, Texas, trying to find some understanding of the cultural phenomenon of Christmas in the United States. He finds both excess and sincerity, waste and love, confusion and certainty in the ways in which the people of Frisco celebrate Christmas. Stuever was embedded with several families in Frisco. He gets to know them by watching them wrap and unwrap, by helping them decorate, by talking with them, and hanging out with them at parties and in quiet moments and while they shop.  He looks, as it were, under the wrapping paper to see what lurks there.  He finds a big idea of Christmas in Frisco, but he also finds something personal, an understanding of his own Christmas artifacts and rituals, an understanding of where the Christmas love in his life could be found. 

The timing of Stuever’s project also allowed him to observe the top of the economic bubble in 2006, and the harsh economic decline that followed for Frisco, like other American cities, over the next two years. 

This book is sharply observant, witty and touching without becoming overly sentimental. There is a kind of beauty in the excess of Christmas and there is a kind of ugliness, though no one likes to look directly at that for too long. Stuever very cleverly hits Christmas from almost every angle you can imagine: examining theology, history, economy, geopolitics, psychology, sociology, electricity, and more, even connecting aspects of Christmas to a sense of manifest destiny and and civil engineering.  He engages all of these aspects in accessible ways, helping us to know and understand, and perhaps to love, the families he writes about.  His subtle conclusion—alluded to in the subtitle, but never directly restated in the text—seems to be about the importance of presence. But don’t believe for one second that his conclusion is cliche, or that this is a tale of personal epiphany, or that Stuever ever abandons his pointed skepticism.

I did not know Stuever’s writing before this, but I seek him out in the Post now and you should too.