A dear friend of mine was distraught. No ho-ho-ho-ing for her.
She had gone to six stores in search of tinsel for her Christmas tree and come up empty every time.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the product — such as the cashier at Marc’s who said, “Tinsel? Is that something that goes in the window?” — it is long, thin, bright, silver strands of plastic you drape over the branches of your tree. It is supposed to look like ice.
Having exhausted her nearby store options, my friend went online and was able to track some down. But the bandits wanted $6 per bag, not the 50 cents or $1 she was accustomed to paying.
Next idea: asking her friends on Facebook. That worked. They directed her to Dollar General. She dashed over and bought 10 packs.
Each pack has 1,500 strands. Yes, that’s 15,000 strands of tinsel.
Each strand is 18 inches long. Bottom line: This loony tune bought 4.3 miles of tinsel.
Ho-ho-ho, indeed.
She put three bags on her tree and stockpiled the rest for future years.
Not all of us have the same level of reverence for the product.
At one point, a conversation about her frustration was overheard by a waiter at the Mustard Seed who volunteered a starkly different opinion: He despises the stuff and has banned it from his house because it’s so messy.
I lean toward his view. At the end of this seasonal merriment and mirth, tinsel turns into a cold killer of vacuum cleaners.
I wondered which opinion was closer to the norm. So I turned to my 5,000 (literally) Facebook friends and posed the question: “To tinsel or not to tinsel?”
Amy Miller Sonntag got right to her point: “Not to tinsel. Too messy. Too tacky. Just say no.”
Rhonda Hershey-McCurry didn’t beat around the bush, either: “It will be everywhere, Bob. Freeze and step back from the tinsel!”
At the opposite end of the spectrum was Michele Bishop: “Some see messy. I see shiny memories of my kids giggling, decorating the tree.
“For me, it reminds of the innocence and joy of children at Christmas. I will be 90 years old and still putting tinsel on my tree because it has a special place in my heart.”
Pet projects
A huge percentage of readers talked about the relationship between tinsel and four-legged members of their household.
“It’s rather pretty when it comes out of my dog’s rear end,” said Linda VonDuyke. “Its shininess makes the poop easier to find in the yard.”
Randy Gyulay gets the same joy from cats. “A festive litter box.”
Beacon Journal Metro Editor Cheryl Powell has vivid memories of wrangling with her cat, Misty. When she saw Misty running across the room, she wondered, “Why is that little rock bouncing around behind the cat? And then I discovered it was connected to the cat. The extraction was an uncomfortable experience for both of us.”
Dozens of others warned that combining tinsel and pets is no laughing matter.
About 20 years ago, says colleague Mary Kay Quinn, “It almost killed one of my cats. Had a very un-festive vet bill.”
Nearly 100 readers weighed in on the question of tinseling or not tinseling, and they were split right down the middle.
But folks on both sides of the fence said the topic took them back to their childhoods.
For D.J. Laka, tinsel evokes “sweet memories of my mom’s Christmas trees. She would use 20 boxes of tinsel. Our trees looked like a shimmering, silvery Cousin It.”
Susie Bible Tigelman loves tinsel and months later enjoys seeing it “gleaming in the sun, stuck to my fence and stuck in the grass in the summer. Comfort. Reminds me of my childhood.”
Bessie Stark loves it and issued a plea: “Do not ban tinsel!”
Nobody’s talking about a ban. It’s more like a trend, a change in fashion.
Application rules
For those who choose to tinsel, or have tinseled in the past, the application process can be enormously important.
Becky Reckner is a non-user because she has “too many memories of ‘Just put one strand on at a time.’ Makes my heart go into fibrillation just thinking of how anal some people are.”
Ditto for Carla Johns. “Mom was quite particular in that they couldn’t be globbed on the tree or lay sideways because icicles didn’t look like that. I hated walking by the tree and the static made the icicles cling to my pants. Then Mom was all over us for how we replaced the rogue strands.”
“It was my dad’s thing,” says Nancy Binzel Brown. “The tree was absolutely covered in it, and it had to be put on in a very particular way.
“You grabbed a handful by one end and starting at the top of the tree, cast the other end on the tree and pulled your hand down so that the tinsel was layered in shimmering strands from top to bottom.
“When we were cleaning out my parents’ things, we found that my dad had a stockpile. My sister mailed each sibling an unopened box for Christmas. Mine is still unopened, 15 years later.”
Joel Mellor’s immediate family would just heave it on the tree, but his aunt “applied the tinsel like a surgeon.”
In the eyes of Wendy Brown Anderson, “the only way to enjoy tinsel: Take a large handful and move to the fifth step on living room stairs. Wait for sister to walk by. Throw it down in her long hair. Sit down and watch the show. Make sure to tell Mom she threw it all over the floor.
“Merry Christmas!”
Sowing discord
In some cases, differences of opinion over the application process can lead to marital discord.
“The tinsel of our youth was a heavier metal-type,” says Tom Stephen. “Our family had the rule: one strand at a time, hung perfectly on each branch. My mother was usually the first to break the rule. She would just throw it on in a clump and walk away. My dad did not think that was funny or Christmassy.”
Alma Kryah-Deblasio has kicked the habit, but is hoping to live vicariously. If your house is free of pets — or your only pets are in a fish tank — “do it!” she pleads. “Do it for me and all the people who have pets!”
When it comes to tinsel, one thing is certain, in the view of Michael Kyner:
“Many billions of years from now, when the universe is sputtering to its end, the only three things that will be left will be cockroaches and carpeting infested with tinsel that you could NEVER remove no matter how hard you tried.”
Bob Dyer can be reached at 330-996-3580 or bdyer@thebeaconjournal.com. To find his podcast, “Dyer Necessities,” go to www.ohio.com/dyer. He also is on Facebook at www.facebook.com/bob.dyer.31