I want all for Christmas: the holiday season, deeply observed, in an affluent Dallas suburb.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: Tinsel: A Search for America's Christmas Present - Book review

Tinsel: A Search for America's Christmas Present

by Hank Stuever

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pp.

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Pillar of the economy, climax of the calendar year, and wellspring of sentiment, myth, and moral teaching, Christmas is that institution which is so influential, so pervasive, so enormous that it seldom requires more than a pop lyricist to help reveal itself. A phenomenon more ripe for journalistic scrutiny, then, would be hard to find, which is why Hank Stuever, a reporter for the Washington Post, spent three Christmas seasons in the Dallas suburb of Frisco, where he was well positioned to observe suburban Americans performing their holiday rituals in their native habitat. The product of his study is Tinsel: A Search for America's Christmas Present, a stylishly written and often delightful book that aims to capture all the things that Christmas is about--family, values, religion, ritual, celebration, kitsch.

Stuever first embedded himself in Frisco in 2006, a year that will soon glow with the status of legend as the last good year before money troubles set in, and he was around in 2008 in time to see the rollercoaster car crest but left before it had plunged all that far. He was certainly fortunate to have seen the good times, for what is Frisco but a place built on the assurance of prosperity? After all, McMansion-packed bedroom communities cemented to one another by enormous shopping malls don't spring up on former prairie land without cheerful optimism ruling the HR departments at Southwest Airlines, Texas Instruments, Frito-Lay, and all the other companies headquartered in Dallas and its environs. None of the people Stuever meets are J. R. Ewing rich, bur none of the people we spend a great deal of time with really worry about money. Even the poorest--and we're talking about a woman with a good j ob who has paid off her home--is someone whose children can afford to buy her a big-screen hi-def TV for her bedroom, even though she already has one in there that works perfectly well bur just isn't quite as large or deffy as the new one. This woman, whose name is Caroll, a couple in their early thirties named Jeff and Bridgette Trykoski, and Tammie Parnell, a wealthy soccer mom who has a holiday decorating business, are Stuever's main subjects; by the end of the book, we know them not only as people bur as consumers. We remember Caroll, for example, as much for her Black Friday pilgrimages to Best Buy, and the annual...