The "Are You A Tinsel Lover...Or Not?" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Late 1970s and Christmas was right around the corner.  Our oldest son was close to 10 years old and loved just about everything about the holidays.  We bought a live Christmas tree at the stand run by a fellow I taught school with and we placed the tree in the living room of our home on Janet Ave. in Lancaster, PA.  To make sure he, nor his two siblings nor our two cats we had, didn't knock over the tree, I fastened the tree stand to the floor with screws and fastened the top to the wall with wire.  We were ready for decorating.  Lights, balls, ornaments and of course the final touch.....tinsel.  

Tinsel to make your Christmas tree reflect light.

My wife just loved to dangle tinsel from just about every branch of the tree.  Very festive, so it was.  But, there was also one other member of the family that loved the tinsel, namely Ivy, our cat.  She would eat the tinsel and then poop it out.  A few times we had to help her since it would come part-way out and then just hang there.  Kids thought that was not only gross, but funny.  Well, that brings me to the theme of my story for the day, tinsel.  Was invented sometime in the early 1600s in Nuremberg, Germany, the same country that created the Christmas tree.  The word, tinsel, comes from the French "estincelle" which means "spark".  No one is quite sure why people decided to drape it on a Christmas tree.  One thing that is known is that tinsel used to be real silver which made beautiful tinsel sounds when the air caused it to be rustled while on the tree.  But, with real candles still in use as ornaments on a tree, the flame would tarnish the tinsel.  Eventually, due to the cost, tinsel was made from aluminum.  

A beautiful tree with tinsel.

If you do a search online you may still be able to find pure silver tinsel, but at a premium price.  Tinsel which we are used to seeing on Christmas trees during our lifetime was partially lead until 1972 when the FDA said that it was too harmful for children to be near and was taken off the market.  Tinsel you can buy today is probably made of plastic or mylar.  Just doesn't lay on the tree like it used to years ago.  One tinsel producer today has the name Brite-Star.  It is a Philadelphia based business that makes about 80% of the tinsel made in the USA.  It makes its tinsel 1/16th of an inch wide and 18 inches long.  The company claims to have made enough tinsel to reach the moon and back which is about 1.6 billion strands of the stuff.  One way or another, if you lived in LDubs house back in the late 70s to the mid 80s, the tree wasn't going anywhere and was strung with the shiny stuff to make it look gaudy.  That was until Ivy consumed so much that she began to glow in the dark.  That was the end of our use of tinsel.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.