We are just a typo-fix away from a completely finished Tinsel book jacket. I think the designer, Michaela Sullivan, did a fantastic job of finding the right mix between the glitzy gaudiness and the moody blue serenity of Christmas. Also, they want to use a metallic-finish paper for the jacket. It’ll be shiny!

Some nice feedback on this Style section feature I wrote on the east coast/mid-Atlantic convenience stores chains. You got your Sheetz and you got your Wawa. Which one do you like better? Me, I dig both. Mostly I just dig driving around for no reason, thinkin’ while drinkin’ enormous diet sodas. Even though I know it’s all bad for the environment. Some comments on the Washington Post web site have been along the usual lines of GET A LIFE.

Dammit, people, can’t you tell I’m trying to?

>>

By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer

All the wild-fowl sang them to him,

In the moorlands and the fenlands,

In the melancholy marshes;

Chetowaik, the plover, sang them,

Mahng, the loon, the wild goose, Wawa . . .

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Song of Hiawatha”

Wawa in the morning, Sheetz at night.

Sheetz in the morning, Wawa at night.

They’re just convenience stores, you shouldn’t think too hard about them. (Fair warning: This story thinks too hard about them.)

By late July, this much came clear: Some of us were going no place exotic in this, the bummer summer. There wasn’t the time or there wasn’t the money. Things keep not happening, or the wrong things happened. We never got farther than the Sheetz convenience store off the interstate. Stood there paralyzed by the choices in a Wawa — what kind of chips, what kind of sandwich, what kind of soda, what kind of frozen chocolate thing? What kind of life? Which? What?

How about just resigning ourselves to summer’s fate? What about a local sort of road trip, a mini-mart epic, bouncing between all the Sheetzes and all the Wawas you can find? Sheetz just opened its 360th location. Wawa will open its 571st this week. We live right where their territories overlap, a lovely Venn diagram of two same-but-different worlds.

Where are you going?

I got the jits tonight. I’m going for a drive.

Where?

I don’t know. The Wawa store in Waldorf and back. Get a big soda and something else. The Sheetz, maybe, out toward Fredericksburg. Or up 270, then Buckeystown. Through Antietam, curving through the dark American mist. I’ll do the Wawa and then a Sheetz, then turn around at Hagerstown. In either a Wawa or a Sheetz I will listen happily to … READ THE REST HERE.

The patented, automated self-Googler Narciss-o-Meter netted the first review of Tinsel this afternoon, in the Aug. 24 issue of Publisher’s Weekly. It’s not a wild rave, but my editor loves the phrase “the gift book that keeps on giving.” I like words such as “impeccable” and “solid.” PW reviews books way before their release date, so off we go. I promise to post whatever comes along, even if it’s a bad review. (Hmmm. Perhaps especially if it’s a bad review, so I can dissect it.)

>>Stuever, a Washington Post staff writer and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, has appeared on The View, The Today Show and NPR with his incisive commentaries. Following Off Ramp, he returns for another heartland safari, this time to observe Christmas celebrations in Frisco, Tex. He explains: “This book takes place over three holiday seasons (2006, 2007 and 2008) among three unrelated families who live in a new megaworld north of Dallas, a place that often seemed to have surrendered its identity to the shopper within.” His seasonal survey begins with Tammie Parnell, who runs a business decorating other people’s homes. In the chapter “There Glows the Neighborhood,” he describes the “Trykoski lights,” a house decorated with 50,000 lights, and traces this holiday history back to 2004 when Carson Williams scored a million-plus Internet hits after synchronizing 16,000 lights to music. Stuever watches the 1.1 million-square-foot Stonebriar Centre mall being decorated at midnight. While single mom Caroll Cavazos shops with her family at Best Buy, the author has an epiphany (“I see it as Caroll sees it. Real lives are being lived here”), and later he goes with her to church and a potluck dinner gift-swap. With impeccable research and solid reporting, Stuever has written the gift book that keeps on giving—Christmas consumerism wrapped together with traditional family values. (release date: Nov. 12)

Note: This is the second part of a series of blog entries between now and the end of the year, in which I talk a little (or a lot) about how Tinsel got made. You can read Episode 1 (”the Idea”) here. Today’s entry is about writing the proposal. If it bores you to absolute tears, skip it. When I was most miserable working on Tinsel, it helped me to read other authors’ blogs about how they did their books, and no detail was ever too small.

Episode 2: I Propose!

So. I’d opened my mouth and put the idea out there. Editor and agent were interested in this: A nonfiction book that would be a journalistic social study on the impact of Christmas on the American economy and psyche. (But funny! And yet serious!)

Now I had to write a book proposal. This was the summer of 2005. I remember promising that I would have a draft of the proposal ready for my agent to look at in a month or two — by early fall at least.

I didn’t.

Let me say this: Even writing a fucking blog item about how to write a book proposal is a chore, at least for me. There’s something about “speculative” writing that just eludes me. It’s the language of what will be, based on half of what you may now know. Maybe it would be easier if I’d spent all these years writing market strategies or grant proposals. Certainly it would have been easier if I’d built a career out of freelance magazine writing, where all you do is write extremely precise, confident letters in the language of pitch-and-propose. I have been trained to write for publication, with the pub date being RIGHT NOW! PANIC!, resulting in something you can hold in your hand hours later. This provides the wonderful, if possibly delusional (we have so many readers!), rocket fuel that makes a newsroom a busy, high-pressure place.

Also, for many years, all my story pitches to my excitable Washington Post editor, Henry Allen, have gone something like:

Hank Stuever: What about something on blue tarps?

Henry Allen: Yesssss.

Which is a long way of saying that I made something that should have been easy — a 20-page proposal — a lot harder, simply by psyching myself into a brain freeze.

How I (finally) went at it: I worked from the basic idea that Christmas is at once America’s favorite moment and also its biggest mindfuck. Yet, I didn’t want a book that would assault Christmas (which would be stupid, and has been done) or mock it (ditto). Still, I wanted it to show Christmas as it is lived – not in gauzy, quaint Hallmark imagery but in the realm of the new normal, out there in the malls and box stores.

Evening-by-evening, weekend-by-weekend, I started educating myself about Christmas. I read bits and pieces in books by historians who’ve done some of the best work on the subject: Stephen Nissenbaum and Karal Ann Marling at first, then others. I began paying deeper attention – for the first time, really – to the sky-is-falling, no-it-isn’t retail journalism that shows up every day in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.

I sought out any journalistic narrative work on Christmas: Had anyone ever done a book (or even a long magazine article?) that focused just on one family’s experiences with the holiday year-in and year-out, tallying all their purchases and dramas? (Not that I could find, not so much. Almost all nonfiction about Christmas is categorized as history or memoir.) I also did some casual sniffing around the academic research – most of which falls within the areas of economics or mental/social health. Found a hilarious paper published in a psychiatry journal that strongly discouraged having Santa Claus pay personal visits to hospitalized schizophrenics. (Ya think?)

I also looked critically at the mountain of holiday themed pop-culture and literary material. Holy shit. The movies and TV specials alone could be a 500-page book. One guy, Jody Rosen, wrote a book (and a pretty good one) just about one song – White Christmas.

I took a real long look at the weirder writing that’s been done on the subject, starting of course with David Sedaris, the category killer, whose Holidays on Ice has sold a squillion copies. Please note that all editions of this book are small enough to be stocking stuffers.

From there, the holiday memoir genre falls off and gets deeply unfunny and cliché.

Christmas ‘05 itself came and went, and once again, my boyfriend Michael and I failed to do much besides string some lights on the balcony, show up for and happily partake in his family stuff in Maryland, and give one another presents. My family doesn’t get together for the holidays (but we keep in touch — we do love one another, honest). I’d stopped sending all my friends my weird little clip-art Christmas ‘zine that I used to make and photocopy every year. I realized that I might not have enough love for the holiday to sustain myself through the experience of writing a book about it.

I also doubted my ability to write a book at all, about anything.

But I kept coming back to the real reason I wanted to do the project: all the subjects I do love writing about intersect with Christmas. Suburban lifestyles, over-the-top behavior, consumer madness, huge displays of religiosity. And things like family dynamics, the good times and bad, the shopping malls, the loss of innocence, the sustainability of human/consumer want, and the ookiness and zaniness of family relationships. I began to see that a book about Christmas would actually be about of 21st-century America in the almighty exurbs.

Great. Which exurb? I went overboard researching and hunting for a place to move and report the book. I read a lot of demographics and data about exurban communities outside Atlanta, outside Charlotte, outside Denver. Then I thought about the Kansas City ’burbs. I read store directories to shopping malls (old malls and new malls) and Census data and other demographic studies. I was drawn to the suburbs on the northern edge of Columbus, Ohio – there was a huge new outdoor mall/mixed use development, and a lot of malls in the city that had seen better days.

My original idea was to tell the story of Christmas in America through the prism of two malls: one mall that was in decline, and the “new” mall where everyone now went. (Or in Chris Rock’s description: “The mall where the white people shop and the mall where the white people used to shop!”). My goal was to focus intensely on the lives of a few families who shopped at either mall, or both.

Now it was January 2006 and I hadn’t typed a word. Um, JUST LIKE EVERY GODDAMN ARTICLE, ASSIGNMENT, TERM PAPER AND ANY OTHER PIECE OF WRITING IN MY LIFE.

With a novel, you’d have most if not all of it written before you pitched it to an agent or publisher. But unless the proposed nonfiction book is based on material that’s already in hand (such as a magazine article in which merely a fraction of the good stuff got published), the writing is largely … pretend. You’re proposing. You’re dreaming big. You use what you have thus far and insist on your vision for discovering and delivering the rest. You’re afraid of it being too light, too trivial, and THEN you worry that it’s too dry, heavy. Then you do laundry, watch TV. Finally you go to Barnes & Noble and look at all the dumb books out there and think, well how bad can mine really be?

My agent, Helpful Heather, sent me copies of two successful proposals from her authors: One was Jeff MacGregor’s Sunday Money. The other was Eizabeth Royte’s Garbage Land.

MacGregor spent a year in an RV following the NASCAR circuit for a true outsider look at the sport and culture, without sneer. Royte’s book was a textured but hardcore exploration of trash, waste, recycling, landfills – crammed with information and anecdotes from throwaway America.

Both proposals intimidated me in all the right ways. They were concise, sharp, entertaining, and sure of themselves. Publishers paid good advances for them and excellent books resulted, books that delivered on their authors’ original proposals. Heather also felt they were the right length – 25 or so double-spaced pages; long enough to tantalize and short enough for busy editors. I’m a Catholic-school kid all the way: show me an example of good work and I will set about emulating it while also trying to subvert the form.

In late January, I wrote a rough draft of my proposal trying to focus my ideas and ambition for the book. Heather read it and didn’t think we were ready to show it to an editor. She had a lot of suggestions and edits. I started on another draft and re-sent it to her a week or so later. She liked it much better. It was titled Xmas: The American Way of Yule.

I just re-read it last night — 3-1/2 years later. In some ways, it’s exactly the book Tinsel wound up being:

“… to move to a community and tell stories about people trying to once again achieve their ideal Christmas. My sense is that their stories will be both hilarious and melancholy. When held up to examination, Christmas challenges the logic of all common sense. People know this. They know that stuff won’t make them as happy as they hope it will … they know the “true meaning,” and many try to live it. But then ‘Xmas’ gets in the way – an irresistible force. … It is my plan to accompany some of these Christmas dreamers as they live it, shop for it, loathe it, adore it, pray for it, and pay for it. …”

The title (“Xmas”) was deliberately provocative, meant to suggest that the Christian meaning had long been mowed over by the retail holiday; the subtitle (“The American Way of Yule”) is a play on Jessica Mitford’s landmark 1963 book about the funeral industry, The American Way of Death, a muckraking journalism classic. While I proposed looking closely at the economics of Christmas and its impact on global trade, I was most interested in proposing a story, rather than an exposé.

Most of my proposal was about a cockamamie personal adventure, and I wrote it that way: To move in late summer 2006 to a “Midwestern”-ish city (i.e., Columbus) and partake in whatever came my way. (I had not yet met and fallen for sexy Frisco, Texas.)

Once there, I proposed, I’d acquaint myself with the community and look for families or individuals willing to let a writer follow them through the holiday season. I thought the book should have three to five families or character-situations in it. For some reason (15 years of feature writing?) I wasn’t too worried about finding the actual people. And for several pages I explained how the story would focus on two shopping malls as a center of the action – one mall new and shiny and hip, and the other mall on the skids.

I wrote some about the tone I thought the book should take. Re-reading the proposal now that it’s over, I think this is the part of Xmas that was most off-base. I envisioned something far less intimate than the book wound up being. The writer who wrote the proposal had not fully opened his mind (or heart) to what was ahead. Nothing in this proposal anticipates the complexity of the stories that would come, nor the enormity of the overriding subject (Christmas), nor the difficulty in telling it.

I guess that’s what prevents me from posting the entire proposal here and letting everyone read the whole thing. It’s just … off. It’s about a writer at a vulnerable spot. He’s trying to talk himself into believing in the book and trying to get others to believe in it too. He’s mostly tap-dancing, instead of doing the really hard work he is both hoping to do and dreading at the same time.

Most laughable about my proposal is that I promised the reporting would wrap up (so neatly!) in early 2007 and that I would somehow magically crank out a first draft in about six months, by July 2007. My final act of hubris was estimating that my manuscript would land exactly and cleanly at 80,000 words. (Another hah-hah.)

Here’s what did work about it. It made me want to write the book.

I look at this 22-page proposal now and think: If I were an editor at a publishing house, I would buy this book. (I also think: What a load of crap.)

In any case, on April 11, 2006, ten months after I’d first talked about the idea, the following went out on Publishers Marketplace, a web site that reports new book deals all day long. I’d proposed, I’d got an offer, and we had a contract:

>>Washington Post “Style” writer Hank Stuever’s XMAS: THE AMERICAN WAY OF YULE, chronicling the lives, debts, and desires of a group of suburbanites during a manic holiday season, to George Hodgman at Holt, by Heather Schroder at ICM (world).

Next: Frisco.

The Dallas Morning News came out today with its semi-annual foreclosure data for the first half of the year. Frisco, the suburb where I reported and set my book, Tinsel, has a high rate — the highest in the D/FW area it appears — especially in the 75034 ZIP Code, west of Preston Road, where the houses are bigger and more expensive.

To be clear, I take absolutely no delight or smugness in passing this information along. I worry a bit that Tinsel will be seen as an assault on all things exurban and on Frisco itself. The reason I find it such a fascinating place to write about is because it is so emblematic of American dreams: plenty of space, big homes, great schools, family-friendly, conservative values, and endless opportunities to shop. But all of that also led to some dark places, economically, environmentally, and even philosophically. People cannot have everything they want, when they want it, for no money down — at least, not always. Frisco is a place to see the best and worst of 21st-century life.

Although Tinsel is a book about Christmas, it’s also about all of these things. Belief in a consumer-credit economy and the belief in Santa Claus and magical thinking are not so far apart.

Yesterday I turned 41. Not much to report — I don’t think it’s possible to have a more boring birthday than the one I had yesterday, mostly because I’ve been fighting off some weird head cold. After a long day at work for both of us, and a muggy walk home (just once I’d love to have a birthday in a non-schweddy climate), I canceled the dinner reservation, and we ordered pizza and watched House Hunters. Suzanne Whang on your birthday — that’s so whrong. (By the way, did you know Suzanne Whang does wildly inappropriate stand-up comedy? I know! It’s so … shocking. The House Hunters nerd!)

Nevertheless, I entered the day’s events into an old notebook-journal where many years ago (college, it seems) I wrote down my recollections of every birthday I could remember. Ages 1-3 are long erased from my mental hard drive, but I do remember some details about #4 (a drum set!) and was able to patch together #’s 5-7. At #8 and #9, the memories really kick in. So, every year, I add to the list and describe what I did, who was there. Someday, when my steel trap mind has turned into an old SOS pad, I’ll be glad I did.

I realized something while entering the non-events of #41 and reading back over the years:

It’s been 25 years since I got my driver’s license.

That would have been #16, in August 1984. It was the summer I worked at the church (I was in charge of typing up, laying out, and Xeroxing 1,200 copies of the church bulletin! My news career goes way, way back, people) and went to Putnam City every day for my driver’s ed class — my daring dalliance with public schooling! It was the summer I listened to “Purple Rain” all the time.

My birthday was on a Sunday that year, which irritated the crap out of me, because it caused me to wait one more day for a driver’s license. I went on a church youth group water-skiing trip that Sunday — life imitates John Hughes, because everyone forgot to wish me happy birthday. In a church group. (Really. WTF.) Oh, and guess what my mother got me? A microwave oven. For our kitchen.

The next morning, Aug. 13, a family friend took me to the Oklahoma State Highway Patrol office where driving tests were administered — my mother was out of town at a conference. I don’t remember much about the test itself. My examiner was a highway patrolman. He barely grunted a word.

What I do remember is my very first trip in a car BY MYSELF. I can tell you almost every detail. It was several hours after the test. I was at home. I was out of shaving cream and contact lens solution. I realized: I can go get some.

It was evening outside. I got in my mother’s Ford Escort wagon and backed out of the driveway. I can tell you what was on the radio: “Missing You” by John Waite. I drove down our street, turned right, turned right again on Rockwell and drove myself to the Venture. (Which was sort of the Wal-Mart of the day.) It seemed almost surreal to be doing it myself, without a licensed driver along. Then I went to Sound Warehouse to look at records. Then I drove down Northwest Expressway to MacArthur and then back to 63rd St., then stopped at 7-Eleven for a Slurpee (Icy Drink to you Okies; see sign above door — it’s a long story why OKC didn’t have “Slurpees”), then back up to Rockwell.

It was maybe four or five miles total.

It is maybe 1 million miles away now. The radio played “The Warrior” by Scandal featuring Patty Smyth, and then “Drive” by the Cars, and then “She-Bop” by Cyndi Lauper.

I can count maybe three or four times in my life where I’ve felt anything like the calm but euphoric freedom I felt that night.

I didn’t always drive mom’s Escort. My car — or, the car I called mine — was still at the Maaco, getting the paint job my mother and I had saved up for. My car in high school was a 1970 VW bug, which had been owned by my grandfather, who sold it to my mother. The Bug had then been driven by a family friend of ours for several years. It sat in the garage for a while too. It was light blue. I had it painted kelly green — pretty close to the picture here. (This one isn’t mine — I found it online.) I also went to Soundtrak (holla, Okies! Whatever happened to Linda Soundtrak?) and got a cassette deck with am/fm. That car was hilarious. The floor was rusting out. Neither the gas gauge nor the odometer worked, even though my grandfather tried replacing the cable twice — I just had to use what became a highly developed intuition for knowing when I was getting close to Empty. In the late fall, my grandfather would crawl under the car and switch on the heat. In the spring, after our first 75-degree day, he’d crawl under there and switch off the heat. There was no defrost, no A/C, no window-wiper fluid squirter.

That was I how I rolled.

July retail numbers are out today. Economists were hoping for “flat as a pancake” and got Less Than Zero instead. Ylan Mui has the fast report, with a picture of somebody’s bored someone just-a shoppin’ at the Kohls. Above, one dude does his part at Express for Men, which, back in the glory days, was called Structure. I think he probably bought a lot of striped dress shirts to wear to the martini bar (or church, same difference).

America is still not shopping.

Michael and I went to see “Julie & Julia” on Saturday afternoon and we both really liked it. It’s true what the critics are saying, though — whenever the story switches back to 2002-’03 and the “Julie blogger so frustrated with her life” parts, you simply bide time until the action reverts back to Meryl Streep’s amazing work as Julia Child in the 1950s and ’60s. (To Amy Adams: if the role calls for short hair, why not just cut your freakin’ hair? That wig was so drugstore and distracted from your otherwise excellent performance. There’s a better wig — better everything — on Meryl.)

Anyhow. Good movie, go see it, even if you cringe at the idea of a Nora Ephron production. Do grab a big bite to eat first. It’s a dazzling food movie; check out this bit o’ Kim Severson genius in the NYT last week about that.

But you know what else? It’s a wonderful PUBLISHING movie, too. The excitement (and letdown) Julia feels as her cookbook, the seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking, wends its way from idea to completion is as present as the aroma of a good boeuf bourguignon. We see Julia struggle with the manuscript. We see rejection.

And sadly, we also see my own publisher drop the ball, as a roomful of ancestral Houghton Mifflin editors and publishers toss Julia out like a burnt cassoulet after she and her colleagues worked eight years (with a $250 advance!) on the first draft of what would become Mastering. …

This of course leads to the happy ending (this is so not a spoiler alert, or shouldn’t be) when Knopf saves the day and publishes Julia’s book — my favorite scenes in the movie. (It’s now in its 49th printing. Forty-ninth.) Audiences groan with pleasure at the sight of all that wonderful food. I also made satisfied sighing noises at the sight of carbon paper and red pencils and when Julia at last puts a mammoth stack of manuscript pages in an 8×11 cardboard box to send off to her publisher. Bliss! So much better than uploading a Word doc attachment to an e-mail. Which is why I was so insistent on sending my own manuscript that way. It really is the same as pulling a perfect souffle out of the oven.

Meanwhile, poor Houghton Mifflin. (Now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.) It hasn’t been an easy year or two for them — the company was sold/acquired three times in the last decade or so, propped up by an almost incalculably valuable backlist and textbook division, pillaged by over-extended hedge-fund investors, and then the center of an industry dust-up late last year when it announced (and then tried to un-announce) that it was indefinitely suspending the acquisition of new manuscripts and proposals. That last bit of bad news led to the exit of the publisher of the trade division — someone who was much admired.

But may I say? Things are looking up at HMH. They are too buying manuscripts and making book deals. There’s a new publisher in place, as of this month. The editor in chief, in my own personal experience, is brillllliant — and she has lavished all sorts of attention on this particular author. Their fall catalog has a lot of interesting titles, which I can only be happily subjective about, since it includes Tinsel. The publicity and marketing people are nothing but enthusiastic. My book was originally contracted with Henry Holt, which also treated me quite well. But when my editor, George, was lured to Houghton in 2007, I was happy he took my book with him, and I still am.

Hang in there, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Maybe you’ll fare better in a Philip Roth biopic.

The ever-intrepid Derba in Dallas sent these iPhone pictures from her shoppin’ rounds on Saturday with the subject line “He is Risen.” Baby Jesus is ready for you now. Derba reports FOUR AISLES of this — where? Sam’s was my guess, but I shoulda known better: It was Hobby Lobby. (What was she doing there? Bless her heart…)

The Staples commercial is back! From 1995, probably one of the best Christmas TV commercials ever, only it’s about Back-to-School. (Which is second-biggest retail event of the year, and often a harbinger of the Christmas forecast.)

I’m sure retailers are wishing it was the mid-to-late ’90s again, too. In 2009, they get excited about year-over-year increases of 1 percent. It hardly seems real that, in 1999, shoppers spent EIGHT PERCENT MORE at Christmas than they had in 1998. Imagine an 8 percent increase in anything now — besides unemployment and foreclosure rates.

Click to watch: Staples — Most Wonderful Time of the Year