Tinsel

“Basically just throw it on the tree,” says the young woman who narrates a YouTube video on how to tinsel a Christmas tree.  Or, she says, you can just lay it over the branches.  Oh, no!  Wrong.  Wrong.  Wrong.

Tinseling is not to be undertaken carelessly (thrown) or thoughtlessly (laid).  It is, as my sister Mary notes, an exact science, requiring hours, if not days, of labor to get just right. 

Here’s the method.  Take TWO (2) strands of tinsel and match them evenly.  Then carefully hang the strands over the very tip of a branch, making sure they hang straight, not touching or pooling on a branch below.  Carefully hang TWO (2) strands of tinsel on each tip of each branch until the tree is completely draped. 

When I was growing up, tinsel was made out of aluminum and lead, the lead ensuring that the tinsel was heavy enough to hang straight down.  So, you could hang just one end of the strands over the tips of the branches, twirl the short and long parts between your fingers, and then pinch the twirled part together to hold the tinsel in place.

That strands of tinsel could be pinched together suggests the difficulty in saving tinsel from year to year, which we tried to do.  (In my large family, extra money for tinsel was not always available at Christmas time, so we saved it when at all possible.)   When tinsel was made of pewter or lead (banned in the 60s), it would squeeze together into a big glob; saving it meant carefully laying it out straight (sometimes having to break off the parts that had been pinched together on the tree), then carefully wrapping in newspaper.  But no matter how careful we were, the next year lots of the tinsel would be stuck together.  The labor-intensive tinseling was made even more time-consuming when we had to take time to carefully disentangle and disengage the separate strands of tinsel.  

So why all this trouble to tinsel our trees?  We must have picked up the tinseling from our mother, and I like to think we followed the tradition because her mother, our grandmother, was of German descent.  Tinsel was invented in Germany in 1610, originally made of extruded strands of silver.  People added tinsel to enhance the flickering candles on Christmas trees, a tradition brought to America by German immigrants in the early 19^th century.  By the 1890s, Christmas ornaments and decorations were arriving in America from Germany; by the early 20^th century, Christmas trees began to appear in town squares across the country and having a Christmas tree in the home became an American tradition.  In the 20s and 30s, German eis-lametta (icicle tinsel) was a popular tree decoration.

There’s even a German folk tale that accounts for the tinsel: the Christmas Spider.

Once upon a time there was a poor woman who couldn’t buy fancy gifts for her children or decorations for their tree.  One Christmas Eve, she decorated a tree as best she could with fruits and nuts.  After she went to sleep, spiders came out and crawled over the tree, leaving their webs behind.  When Father Christmas (or Santa Claus or the Christ Child, depending on the version you read) visited the house, he saw the web-covered tree and decided to turn the webs to silver.  In the morning when the family awoke, the tree was sparkling and beautiful.

The German tradition of Christmas trees and decorations continued in America even through two World Wars when many German ideas were abandoned as unAmerican.  But war or no war, Americans were dedicated to their Christmas trees and tinsel – and after.   After WW II, Germany was divided into four zones, one managed and occupied by the United States.  German manufacturers were banned from exporting goods to the US; however, American authorities permitted the sale of toys and holiday decorations as long as they were marked: Made in US Zone – Germany. During the 1950s, tinsel and tinsel garlands were so popular that they were frequently used more heavily than Christmas lights.

It was during the 50s that we were obsessively hanging strands of tinsel on our family’s Christmas trees; the photo shows our family tree in San Francisco in 1954.  I wish I could say that my old German grandmother brought the tinsel tradition and the spider story to our family, but I never heard a peep from her – or from my mother, for that matter, about either one.  In fact, the only German-related family story I know about tinsel is from my youngest sister, Teresa.  She says tinseling is one of her most vivid childhood memories.  Terrified of us and our insistence on perfectly hanging tinsel, she called another sister, Pat, a tinsel Nazi.

Tinsel has fallen out of favor these days for a variety of reasons; no one in our family uses tinsel on Christmas trees any more,  and there are no red boxes of tinsel in the Christmas decoration section of stores, either.  But still that’s no excuse for a video instructing tinsel neophytes to “Basically just throw it on the tree”!  With such a long and storied history, tinsel deserves more respect.

Christmas - San Francisco - 1954

Cutting Corners

My little walking group meets on Tuesday mornings for walk and talk and coffee and more talk and walk, and I’ve noticed my friends often cross the street on a diagonal or meander rather than going to the corner and crossing straight across to the other corner.  The tidy mind rebels. 

I’m reminded of pug walks.  Neil (my husband) provides pug day care for my daughter’s pugs, which includes walking them.  Our walking patterns have since  changed, but a few years ago ago I’d often go with him on the pug walks.  When I was with them, we’d all go straight across the street.  However, I noticed that sometimes the pugs would start off on a diagonal, spilling the secret that when I wasn’t along, Neil would cut corners.  Aargh.

So why was (and am) I so uptight about not cutting corners?  Why do I insist on going all the way to the corner and then going straight across??? 

Let’s go back a few more years, back to when I was taking walking classes at the local college.  At the end of each class, the instructor had us walk circuits around the basketball court with no cutting corners!  Some number of circuits equaled one-quarter mile, and we usually needed some number of circuits to make our mileage goal for the day.  Can’t remember the number, but can remember no cutting corners!

I made very sharp turns on those basketball court corners, remembering the marching commands column left and column right; maneuvers that involve putting one foot slightly behind the other, then rotating sharply on the balls of both feet in order to be facing at a right angle from the original position.

I learned those commands when I was on the traffic patrol in 7^th and 8^th grades – way back in 1949-1951.  Traffic patrol was a big deal.  I was ecstatic to be selected and very conscientious about attending every drill.  We marched around the playground in groups of four, proudly wearing our white belts, something like ammunition belts that went across one shoulder and around our waists, shouldering our stop signs as if they were rifles.   We practiced marching twice a week; our instructor must have been a drill sergeant during the war.  I can hear his voice yet:  Column RIGHT HAR! and we’d march along for a while, then Column LEFT HAR!  We would pivot as one and march some more, around and around the schoolyard.

Marching was one of the coolest things about being on traffic patrol because we got out of school to practice.  The other cool thing was leaving class five minutes early to meet on the playground, march around importantly (column RIGHT HAR! column LEFT HAR!),  and then march out to the street, each foursome responsible for one of the four intersections around the school.  And – oh, yes – the leader of each foursome had a whistle.  If anyone would be so foolhardy as to try to cross the street without our being in the crosswalk holding up the stop signs, a sharp blast on the whistle would paralyze the scofflaw in his or her tracks.  And of course we never tolerated cutting corners.

Pop Tabs

It’s not always easy to pinpoint the genesis of an obsession, but this one is pin-pointable: summer 2009.  That summer, the Livermore Shakespeare Festival produced A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Concannon Vineyard.  The costume designer decided on a steam punk theme for the fairies’ costumes and sent out a call to all of us in the company to save pop tabs for her, pop tabs she would use to make the fairies’ jewelry and decorate their costumes.  My daughter, Karen, who is also a member of the company, mentioned that one of her coworkers collects pop tabs.  Collects pop tabs.  Ah, yes.  Of course.

Karen’s friend, Kathy Hampel, the pop tab collector, was willing to donate as many pop tabs as needed.  She had boxes of them.  We were all grateful and agreed to collect pop tabs to repay Kathy for her kindness without a thought as to what that might mean.

We started by simply breaking off the tabs before recycling aluminum cans.  We don’t use too many of them at our house, but we soon started buying anything we could in aluminum cans instead of bottles so we could get the tabs – V-8 juice (me), diet soda (husband Neil and Karen).  Then we started noticing an occasional aluminum can in a gutter or thrown against a building.  Grabbed it and retrieved the tab.  Touring a theater complex, we saw some cans in a field left over from workers’ lunches.  Grabbed them and retrieved the tabs.  We mentioned to our friends that we were collecting pop tabs, and they began saving them as well.  When Neil has his Monday lunch get-together with the guys, his friends often bring a handful of pop tabs they’ve saved. 

When we go for our walks, we peer into garbage cans in the parks; when we find aluminum cans we grab them and retrieve the tabs.  One day, we passed a truck parked in front of a neighbor’s house.  The little side slot in the side of the truck bed was filled with aluminum cans!  Our fingers were itching – but we didn’t see the owner to ask permission so had to let them go.  Sometimes on recycling days we’ll find cans in the gutter or street that the recycling truck leaked.  The other day, Neil came upon a brown paper bag on a picnic table.  He looked in the bag.  It held a 12-pack of Bud, empty cans (all but one).  So he grabbed and retrieved 11 pop tabs!  Bonanza!  It’s all we can do to keep from leaping out of the car on freeway approaches when we see cans lying in the weeds.  We keep our eyes peeled for pop tabs on the street, in parking lots, wherever we are.  It’s an obsession, an addiction, a frenzy.

So what do we do with them?  Well – we pass our collection along to Karen who turns them in to her coworker, Kathy.  As it turns out, Kathy belongs to an exclusive Airstream recreational vehicle owners club whose members gather for an international rally somewhere in the U.S. each summer, and club members perform community service projects.   One of these is supporting the Ronald McDonald House Charity, an international organization that supports the families of children receiving medical treatment.   And one of the ways to support RMHC is to donate collections of pop tabs (all explained on the RMHC website at http://rmhc.org/how-you-can-help/pop-tab-collections/).   Those little tabs can make a difference.  Last year, Kathy’s club collected 1628 pounds (!) of pop tabs and donated $300 to RMHC.  One RMHC chapter in the midwest raises $30,000 a year through its pop tab program.

If you’d like to join in, send us your tabs.  And if you should see a hoary-headed (see Post #2) couple rummaging in trash bins, the situation may not be as dire as it appears.  We’re just looking for pop tabs.

Gray or Grey?

Once I determined my vanity could accommodate gray hair, I worried about how to spell it: gray or grey?  A retired English teacher, I am pretty persnickety about words.  Which would be correct?  Or at least best?

Curious, I Googled.  Turns out gray-with-an-a is the generally accepted American spelling while grey-with-an-e is British, according to the definitions I looked at.  One helpful site pointed out a nifty mnemonic: grAy = American spelling; grEy = English.

Which diverted me from obsessing about gray (or not) hair to considering some of the differences between British and American spelling (not to mention definitions and pronunciation, but that’s another topic or two).  I vaguely remember that when I was very young, some spellings retained the British “u”in words like color/colour, honor/honour, favor/favour.  I thought the spelling conventions were just then changing, but it turns out (another foray into Google) that current British English spellings follow, for the most part, those of Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), whereas many American spellings follow Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828).

Naturally, the next step would be to find out how Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster spelled gray/grey in their respective dictionaries.  Assuming that grey would be Dr. Johnson’s choice, I looked there first.  Here’s the first part of his entry: “GREY. adj. [gris, French. More properly written gray.]  See GRAY.”  Hmm. He does, however, quote a line from King Lear which uses grey, but no doubt gray is his choice.  He goes on for at least a third of a page with definitions of gray, including illustrative quotes from Milton, Newton, Dryden and Shakespeare, among others.  (That Shakespeare used both spellings is no surprise.  He’s never been accused of being a consistent speller.)

Well, then.  Let’s see what Noah Webster’s American dictionary has to say.  “GRAY.” Webster doesn’t include any examples, just several definitions of gray as both noun and adjective (“white with a mixture of black,” “white: hoary,” etc.).   Webster’s entry for grey reads simply, “See Gray.”

So much for the observation about American/British spelling sources, at least where gray/grey is concerned.

So I’m glad I chose gray-with-an-a.    Gray seems lighter, airier, less ashen than grey.  Though I kind of like Webster’s “hoary.” Jazzes things up a bit.   

Going Gray

So here I am, an old dog trying to learn a new trick:  how to write a blog, how to share some of my thoughts on senioritis in general and some on my exciting retirement projects.  But that's for later.

Right now, I'm getting used to the idea of having gray hair.

I went gray after over 40 years of attempting to reject the aging process by coloring my hair, colors ranging from OLR (old lady red) to beige.  ("Blonde," it seems to me, implies something other than the color of an aging woman's hair.)  My natural color – as near as I can remember – was a kind of reddish-brown.

For a while coloring meant regular trips to the local drugstore, bringing home a hair-coloring solution, trying to keep from splashing color all over the bathroom walls (and usually spending more time cleaning up than dying), and breathing shallowly to avoid the foul-smelling ammonia or whatever it is that smells in those formulations.

I finally decided I couldn’t deal with the mess anymore so took on the time and expense of having my hair colored at a beauty salon.  For a while OLR was the color of choice.  After a while it seemed too garish (esp. as the years advanced), so I toned it down to that beige color adopted by SO many women of a certain age.  Boring.  But I stuck with it until the cosmos decreed otherwise.

My hair is thin, exposing my scalp to sun damage, leading eventually to a shaved head.  For a while I wore a wig.  It was fun.  I liked having HAIR!  Not so thin.  The wig was the same beige my (colored) hair had been, same style, so I didn’t feel like I made too obvious a change.  As my hair grew back in, I thought, "Well, I'll just dye my hair to match the wig.  No one will know the difference." 

Well – the scalp issues continued.  I had to use a special shampoo that would strip the hair of artificial color.  Not only that, but while I was (more or less) hairless, the wig pretty much stayed in place, held by peculiar little strips of tape. Once my hair started growing back, the wig began slipping around.  I didn’t have enough of my own hair to pin down the wig effectively, and my (by now) gray hair was showing around the edges.  Everytime I caught sight of myself in a mirror, the wig was askew, or I'd catch myself adjusting my "hair" as I cruised the aisles of the supermarket.

Fine.  The hair-coloring business, the wig, the worry was getting way too complicated.  Forget it (to put it politely) and go gray.  Which I did.  But....gray or grey?  Next post.