Tinsel by Hank Stuever

I picked up Tinsel because it made The New Yorker magazine's 2009 reading list, and because I was in the mood for something seasonal, but Hank Stuever -- self-proclaimed professional "snarkist" -- doesn't just attack our yuletide binge-decorating disorder, he turns an acid pen against our entire consumerist culture, while gamely admitting that he is part of that culture himself, a "man unashamed to be seen closing the bar at Applebee's."

He's not far off the mark. Consider the incisive wit Stuever uses to describe mall culture, as if in a guidebook for alien invaders:

On Saturday night there are married couples, MILFs with their DILFs, who've hired babysitters so they can have dinner at the Cheesecake Factory or California Pizza Kitchen and now wander around Barnes & Noble, browsing together and then drifting apart, until it is time to ride the escalator up to the AMC 24 for a 9:20 showing of a comedy starring Will Ferrell or Will Smith or Will Anybody.

Stuever announces that he intends to write "a Fast Food Nation or The Omnivore's Dilemma, only about ornaments." That's high company to align oneself with, and Stuever does his job of informing us all about the many details surrounding the Christmas industrial complex, with enough human interest stories to keep us interested along the way. We follow Tammie, the Martha Stewart of Christmas, a family over its head in Christmas debt, and a woman trying to put the "Christ" back in Christmas.

Pollan taught us much about where our food comes from and how we might change our eating habits. What does Stuever have to teach us? If he's trying to help us understand our cultural over-consumption, he only glances at an explanation by hinting that what we really crave is a pre-9/11 innocence, when we believed in Santa and the sanctity of our borders. But that doesn't explain much, since, as Stuever himself points out, the indulgent traditions of Christmas go way back to Victorian times.

No, what Stuever leaves us with is not some powerful moral or intellectual lesson. It's rather a queasy feeling, like having too much egg nog.