I found this picture online of Bea and Helen's book club, 1952. They look like some smart readers.

Courtesy of the marketing elves at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Mariner Books, here is a useful (I think) Readers’ Discussion Guide.

If your book club is reading Tinsel, please know that I’m always open to answering your questions by e-mail. If you live in the D.C. area, I’m also happy to come visit your group for a discussion, as long as it won’t inhibit frank talk about the book. (Trust me, I can take criticism!) If you live farther away and want to try something via Skype, I’m open to that, too.

Here’s the guide. For more images of the people written about in Tinsel and Christmas in Frisco, click here. Enjoy!

Tinsel by Hank Stuever
Reading Group Guide

Discussion Questions

•    How did reading Tinsel cause you to reevaluate how you celebrate the holidays (if at all)? Which topics or characters did you relate to most, in both positive and negative ways? Will you make any changes this holiday season because of the book?

Another Black Friday at Target

•    In the past few years, how has the state of the economy changed how you celebrate Christmas? Have you exchanged fewer (or more) gifts? Have you decorated more or less?

•    In the Prologue, Stuever writes, “I wanted this story to be about Christmas but also everything else: our weird economy, our modern sense of home, our oft-broken hearts, and our notions of God” (page 5). Do you think he achieved this? What is this book about really?

•    What has been your best Christmas ever, and your worst Christmas ever? What made each so good or so bad?

•    On page 7, Caroll “wonders if maybe this is how memories are made now. Maybe the shopping is the memory itself.” Discuss what it is you like or dislike so much about Christmas. Is it the shopping, the decorating, the parties, the gifts, or the people that can make or break a Christmas season? When you remember Christmases past, what are the memories that stand out?

•    Why do you think Stuever chose to write about Frisco, Texas? How is Frisco emblematic of the American experience? Thinking about Stuever as a character in the book, what were his personal reasons for choosing Frisco? How does he feel about Christmas and how does that feeling change over the course of the book?

Tammie ... and friends

•    “The still-intact Victorian conventions of Christmas have Father worrying about money and security, and Mother saddled with making everything look and feel right—whether she has the holiday spirit or not” (page 23). Discuss the traditional gender roles associated with the holidays and how they play out in your own family. Why do you think these delineations have persevered over the years?

•    Every year Tammie helps at least one family during the holidays, which is attributed to her Christian nature (page 30). How do you balance that with the extreme materialism she also participates in when she decorates others’ homes? Later in the book, Stuever talks about listening to the KLTY Christmas Wish radio segments with Tammie and notes that the “powerful currency in the anecdotal” at Christmastime often prompts our charitable natures (page 132). Do you think we give so much at Christmas in part to make up for how much we consume? Why or why not?

•    “Is it possible, Bridgette wonders, that there’s some bottomless need here that people have? For Christmas lights?” (page 46). Why are Christmas lights so popular? Why do they make us feel so good? What is behind the inevitable competition to do more, be brighter, go bigger than our neighbors?

Jeff and Bridgette's house

•    What is your Christmas baggage, so to speak? Talk about how your family has affected your feelings about the holiday.

•    “Choruses of angels are not harking and heralding for me. I prefer dark, slightly twisted Christmases” (page 109). Stuever seems to suggest there are two types of people when it comes to Christmas—you either love it or you hate it. Why does Stuever fall into the darker camp? Which type are you?

•    “The angst over Santa’s existence comes not from the children, I think, so much as the grownups . . . Once you know

Caroll and Marissa

there is no Santa, then there’s no stopping the awful truth about everything else” (page 181). When did you learn the truth about Santa? What about your kids (if you have them)? Would you take Stuever’s advice and use the idea that once you know about Santa you get to become Santa? How else can we ease the pain of learning the truth?

•    On page 187 Tammie has her epiphany that Christmas is “not about the stuff.” So she forgoes expensive Christmas presents and takes her family on vacation so she can experience a “total moment” with them. What was the family’s total moment and was it worth it? Have you ever made a decision similar to Tammie’s?

•    Shopping for Monkey Bread with Bridgette (page 241) reminds Stuever of his own Christmas tradition. “I was happy and did not know it until now” (page 243). Why did it take so long for Stuever to realize there was a part of the holiday he enjoyed? What do you do every Christmas Eve? What one item reminds you most of it?

My broader analysis of the cultural zombie fixation, vis-a-vis my Walking Dead review on Sunday.

And another nice use of art on the section front (see below), courtesy of illustrator Zohar Lazar. The print edition of the newspaper is still a bargain and a visual treat that the web site just frankly still isn’t. However, with the web version, you get a brief slide show of zombies. In a perfect world, you’d get both the lovely freelance illo AND the web extras. Maybe iPad will somehow deliver on the promise of principled design and neat, new geegaws…

The paperback edition of Tinsel shipped in early October and is in stores now — usually you can find it in the “cultural studies,” “sociology/culture” or “American culture” shelves, with all the books about pot, tattoos, prisons, the real-estate bust, shopaholism, and meatpacking and other biofood nightmares, which is as good a home as any for it.

Maybe, as December slithers closer, some savvy bookstores will put it out on the holiday display table between Glenn Beck’s The Christmas Sweater (ralph), all those Melody Carlson books (hurl), and the perennially best-selling David Sedaris stacks of Holidays on Ice (snore).

As you can see, there’s a new cover, and a new attitoooood:

The marketing this time is more direct: CHRISTMAS BOOK!! CHRISTMAS BOOK!! WOOP-WOOP!!

Cover blurb: “LAUGH-OUT-LOUD FUNNY” claims USA Today.

Well, yes. I think the full sentence in the USA Today thing was something more like “Laugh-out-loud funny, and oddly depressing,” which is a whole lot more true, in’t it?

I’ve enjoyed working with editor Meagan Stacey at Mariner Books (Houghton’s paperback division) as she settled on the new cover and the right “blurbs” from reviews to put on the front, back, and inside front pages. (The back cover of the paperback has what was obviously my favorite blurby blurb: “Cultural anthropology at its most exuberant!” – The New Yorker. If that’s not a stamp of elitist approval, then what is?)

I like the new cover. I think it’s smart and simple and takes advantage of some hard truths about catchy design and what happens to books when they’re on a shelf or a table and the customer’s eye is darting here and there.

I liked the hardcover version, too. I mostly just like getting the chance to do it again.

* * *

As for “laugh-out-loud funny,” I’m glad that people find a lot in Tinsel to laugh at, because I meant for it to be that kind of book. I also meant for it to be a “cry quietly” book.

But while we’re on the subject, let me tell you a not-so-secret secret about book writers. We know when people have read (I mean, finished) our books. It’s always some peculiar cue that we privately register whenever someone’s talking to us about our latest book. With appreciative smiles plastered on our faces, we can nevertheless tell: you didn’t read it. Even our close friends and relatives — we can tell by what they say about the book.

When people tell me how funny Tinsel is, and nothing else, then I know they didn’t get past about page 35. (And that’s okay!)

Here is a picture someone sent me last November or December, when I was in such a dither about the book’s release. The person who sent it to me said that her sister took the picture while waiting for a flight in the Denver airport.

I have no idea who this woman is, but she’s reading Tinsel, and from the way she’s holding it (it acts as a helpful visor from the sunlight), it feels like she’s not very far in yet, perhaps halfway. I hope she kept going.

I want to tell you what this sort of picture means to a not-famous author. It means everything, basically. (And it’s a big reason why I hate the Kindle and iPad revolution, which removes the serendipitous encounters we unknowingly spark when people can see the covers of the books we’re reading.)

I know when people have really read Tinsel, because when they have, they talk about everything besides the humor in it. One of the real joys of the last year has been the stream of e-mail (a lot in January, tapering off lately to five or six a month, sometimes more) that I’ve received from readers who have a lot of thoughts spurred by finishing Tinsel. They write to me about stuff deep in the book, like the “fake” children on the Angel Trees; poor Caroll losing her infant grandson after so much hope and prayer and effort; the American economy unraveling; Tammie’s thoughts about living in a bubble. The final third of Tinsel is not so “laugh-out-loud funny,” but it does have its funny moments, right?

That doesn’t make a lot of sense to marketers and the sales staff — either it’s a funny book or it isn’t. Either it’s about Christmas or it isn’t. Either it’s happy or it’s sad.

But what about life? Isn’t life often hilarious and tragic and always somewhere in between those two extremes? If you’re really getting the book, you’ll also get the melancholy undercurrent. (After all, I worship at the feet of Gene Weingarten.)

Some Christmas books, on the other hand, have no ambivalence whatsoever about what they mean to be. Here’s how I should have gone:

Oh well, hindsight is all.