Whatever happened to …

… tinsel?

If you have a Christmas tree within eyesight, it will be interesting to share whether or not you have tinsel on it.

These days, it can come in many different forms. Growing up, for us it came in long metallic strips and we had it all over the family Christmas tree. Real trees in the beginning and later artificial. When I branched out on my own, it was a tradition that didn’t follow. Although …

It was a big deal for my mother. After the tree was up, the decorations added, the lights arranged, the crowning touch was strips of tinsel all over the tree. The effect was impressive. The metal in the tinsel amplified the lights making it appear that there was much more than there actually were. Leading up to Christmas, it was hard to deny that it really made for a beautiful effect.

It was after Christmas that the real pain hit. It was a tedious process because the family would all gather to take the tinsel off and carefully wrap it around some cardboard for storage until next year. We worked hard at it and yet there was still this stuff seemingly everywhere including out by the street for the real tree pickup date. When we moved to the artificial tree, some of that stuff ended up being packed away with the tree, only to return next year.

It was also a personal decoration for some of my high school girls who would weave it into their hair for an effect. At times, it became a classroom management issue. My room had carpeting and if you didn’t have running shoes on with rubber soles, you could shuffle your feet and touch a tinsel strip in the hair and get a yelp from the static electricity! But the worst thing ever happened when a strip got sucked into a desktop computer and caused a short as the tinsel made contact with places that didn’t need contact. Needless to say, banning of tinsel from the classroom didn’t help my Scrooge image.

I’d like to say that tinsel is not a thing around here these days. But every now and again a strip appears. We’ve inherited my parent’s old tree and many of their decorations and every now and again, one appears. That does bring back memories

For the last Sunday going into Christmas…

• do you use tinsel on your Christmas tree?
• is there a secret to collecting it all after the fact?
• does tinsel appear in any different form at your place?
• have you ever experienced the static electricity from tinsel or any other decoration?
• as for the decorative effect, yes or no?

Please share your shiny thoughts in the comments below.

This post originated from:

https://dougpete.wordpress.com

If you read it anywhere else, it’s not the original.