Wrapped In Nostalgia

Fake Snow, Plastic Santas: The Christmas Equivalent of Comfort Food

PHILADELPHIA

The December issue of Martha Stewart Living suggests surrounding our fireplaces with a holiday garland crafted from blue atlas cedar and seeded eucalyptus boughs, punctuated with five varieties of pink and red poinsettias. The magazine also shows how to turn an ordinary birch-bark bowl into a yuletide basket -- practically crying out to be filled with cranberries -- by weaving loose pine fronds into a lovely handle.

But that's not quite how they do it in South Philly.

Here at the Brite Star factory -- a sprawling decommissioned Army depot whose forbidding gates and beige concrete belie the fact that it's always Christmas inside-- they're still making and selling the same shiny Icicle tinsel that they've been pushing for half a century. You remember Icicle tinsel, don't you? That's the silvery stuff you would gather up in your hand like spaghetti strands and drape (or, if you were an impatient 9-year-old, fling) over the branches of your Christmas tree, where it would catch the light, dazzle the eye and wreak havoc on your vacuum cleaner come January.

Instead of poinsettia or pine, think polyvinyl chloride.

"Actually, they used to make it with a lead-based film, and it was so beautiful," says Brite Star's Judy Kinderman, lost in a temporary reverie. The weight of the lead meant that the Icicles "clung to the tree and hung straight down. But of course they had to be removed from the market. That was a huge change in the industry. We still get calls all the time about it."

Holiday decorations were once unabashedly glittery things, proud of their plasticity and unconcerned with denoting elegance (or with preventing lead poisoning, for that matter). For many of us who grew up in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, the season officially began when Mom brought the big boxes out from storage, packed with all the shiny totems of the season: round Shiny Brite tree ornaments of multicolored, gossamer-thin glass; garlands of silver tinsel that looked like something Liberace might wear around the house; scale-model country churches whose steeples lit up when you plugged them in; and enough injection-molded Santas, reindeer, snowmen and flock-watching shepherds to fill Christmas Island -- or the island of Taiwan, whence many of them came.

Once the children of the Cold War era grew up and moved into homes of their own, however, the decorations of Christmas past slipped over the invisible line into kitsch. By the time Martha Stewart published her now-legendary Christmas book in 1993 -- which instructed readers on how to gild freshly foraged pine cones, among other things -- it was clear that many Americans' holiday-decorating tastes had slipped over a line of their own, from carefree gaiety to something like self-consciousness.

But the pendulum may be swinging back, as pendulums are wont to do. In addition to Icicles and other timeless tinsel products, Brite Star is doing a brisk business in Christmas lights. And if the company is reading the data right, the multicolored bulbs of yore -- overtaken in the 1990s by clear lights, which were considered more sophisticated -- are poised to make a big comeback this year.

"A lot of people are just feeling reminiscent for older times," says Brite Star's Richard Kinderman, Judy Kinderman's son. "And multicolored bulbs have a warmer, more 'family' feeling than clear bulbs do. So what we're seeing, as far as trends go, is a lot more multi-bulb sales versus clear-bulb sales." The normal sales ratio for the past five to seven years, he notes, has been "clear- to multi-, two to one. But in 2005 they sold almost equally."

Home-decorating guru and HGTV host Susie Coelho has noticed the trend. "White lights have been the most popular for a while now. But by last year we were noticing a trend toward making Christmas more full, more like it had been in the past, where you had tons of stuff everywhere . People were not only going back to colored lights, but we were starting to see other things, like lots of these giant blow-up Santas, snowmen and sleighs with reindeer."

Coelho admits that at one time she might have considered such oversize inflatables tacky. But their goofy, guileless charm won her over, and this year she put one up at her house in Palm Desert, Calif. ("The kids love it," she says.)