Hank Stuever on Frisco, Tex., the 'Tinsel' town that's always sold on Christmas

By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 9, 2009; C01

Excerpted from "Tinsel: A Search for America's Christmas Present" by Hank Stuever. © 2009, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

I set out to tell a story about Christmas, but also about everything else: our weird economy, our modern sense of home, our oft-broken hearts, and our notions of God. The biggies. To tell it, I turned to a world made possible by chain stores, in an American economy mainly powered by the magical thinking of retail.

Where novelists and the makers of romantic holiday comedy movies exaggerate and fictionalize the Christmas past (cozy Dickens villages, snowy mornings, Cameron Diaz and Jude Law in turtleneck sweaters), I desired something more true, to see the nation's half-trillion-dollar holiday in the high-definition light of the early 21st century, the real Christmas present, starting at the butt-crack of dawn in front of the big-box stores. I wanted to be there with hundreds of rabid consumers who'd waited all night for the melee of Black Friday to begin. I went looking for a country living not only on borrowed time, but also on borrowed grace.

Which is how I wound up in Frisco, a former farm town turned Dallas mega burb, north of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Freeway, north of the President George Bush Turnpike; a place that grew in 15 years from 6,000 people to 100,000 people and, in the past decade, opened 7 million square feet of chain retail and restaurants.

I went toward the starter mansions. I went for the Sunday mornings at the giant churches, rockin' to those ring-tone power ballads for Christ. I longed to see neighbors compete to have the best holiday light displays. I wanted to bask in all that bless-your-heart. The hottie moms in pink feather boas and Ugg boots waiting in line at Starbucks; the hottie dads in camouflage hunting gear examining flat-screen upgrades at the Best Buy. I wanted all that. Lord, I wanted to borrow some grace, too.

I stuck a pushpin on a map.

Frisco.

I liked its endless strip malls and its sense of prefabricated wonder. I moved there in the easy-credit bliss of 2006, when there were still Bush/Cheney bumper stickers, when anyone could buy anything they wanted and pay for it some other day. By the time I finished my story two Christmases later, the air had gone out of things, like a listing inflatable Santa. It all turned into foreclosure gossip and everything-must-go sales. Yet I clung to the miracle of the place, noticing the ways in which Frisco seemed impervious even to this, the worst economy in decades.

Busy elves

Christmas in the suburbs brings forth this curiously heightened sense of the solo-entrepreneurial, beyond the usual Pampered Chef and Mary Kay hawkers.

By October, it feels as if everyone in Frisco is selling anything with Santa on it. Some people have day jobs and sell stuff on the side. Others do it full time, stockpiling all year for the church bazaar circuit. For some it's a hobby gone haywire, often with Jesus as the unseen business partner.

Tammie Parnell (who was then 44) is a wife and mother of two, one of those gated-community supermoms who has volleyball schedules, tutor times and carpool arrangements abuzz in the BlackBerry that is her brain. When Christmas comes, she fires up her one-woman business, Two Elves With a Twist, which involves Parnell charging customers up to $1,000 a day to do their interior decorating. ("Why Two Elves?" I ask. Long story short, the first elf couldn't hack it after a year. Too much work, too intense -- too much Christmas? For all I know, the remains of the first elf are neatly bubble-wrapped in a Rubbermaid tub, squirreled away in Parnell's three-car garage.)

Her Christmas decorating business is all-consuming. She will help you decide how to decorate the big tree in your 5,000-square-foot home's vast lawyer-foyer. What sort of plastic garland for the front stairs? The mantel? What sort of tree for the family room, the media room, the baby's room? Parnell is there, with answers and action, saving you from all that Victorian-era "hearth and home" guilt of imperfect decor, all those plastic tubs filled with old ornaments.

On a Thursday afternoon in November, she hosts an open-house bazaar at her home, inviting her vendor friends (other inventive homemakers, mainly) to set up shop: One co-owns a company called Two Funny Girls, selling holiday and sports-themed Styrofoam party cups. "Gobble til you wobble," reads one with a turkey on it.

Another self-starting entrepreneur is stirring soup and baking muffins in Parnell's kitchen, part of her job as sales consultant for an outfit called Homemade Gourmet, which sells assorted easy-to-prepare meals and powdered cake, cookie and muffin mixes. The Homemade Gourmet lady goes on at length about her product line, and about the woman who founded the company on Christian principles. "She doesn't want to just sell food," the soup-stirrer informs me. "She wants to change America. She wants to change values for the better."

Aww, snowman poop

On most Saturdays, I go to a different church holiday bazaar, where someone is always selling faith-based scrapbooking materials. They're selling nutritious smoothie mixes boxed in healthful, family-centered packaging; they have licenses to peddle Christ-centered body lotions and face creams.

They make jewelry in their spare time -- cross-shaped belt buckles and inspirational cuff bracelets. They sell baby clothes bought wholesale, under business names like Angel Darlin'. They sew Santa onto almost anything, especially denim vests they also buy wholesale, BeDazzling them for resale. In garage workshops, men cut and paint plywood into manger animal shapes and approximations of Disney and "Peanuts" holiday characters to sell for your lawn display.

Spare-time artists paint elaborate watercolor family trees, with all your relatives in the branches (and the ones you don't like left off), the perfect gift. At one bazaar, a woman is selling clear bags of tiny marshmallows, onto which she has stapled a construction paper snowman and the label: "You've been naughty so here's the scoop. All you're getting this Christmas is snowman poop!" She wants $2 apiece for them. From a few feet away, they look like little baggies of crack. In a way, it's all crack.

But handmade, right? Local, correct? After listening to a woman at another church bazaar talk about how hard her daughter worked painting these lovely Santa figurines, I ask why this one has a "Made in China" sticker on his backside.

"Well, all but those," she corrects herself. "Actually, that's not our stuff there, I'm selling that for a friend. She does those."

A bazaar scene

At Tammie Parnell's urging, I prowl around a weekend-long event called 'Neath the Wreath at the civic center in the suburb of Plano. It's the Junior League holiday bazaar, featuring 108 merchants.

The event attracts 10,000 customers from Friday to Sunday. The Junior Leaguers have transformed this drab convention hall into a glossy winter wonderland of high-Kountry expression, aimed straight at the niche market of women in their 30s and 40s who've taken to calling themselves "divas."

Here is a ready-made market for cake servers shaped like leopard-spotted stiletto heels, or mammogram-advocacy key chains that say "Gram Your Mams." At an opening party -- "Ladies' Night Out" -- there are several hundred women in sparkly, skimpy peasant tops and empire-waist low-cut blouses and tight pants, with their blond hair teased up or straightened to a sheen, squealing at one another about how cute they look, how cute this is, how cute that is, and did you see these -- these diapers that say "Drama Queen"?

The ladies coo over party dresses, skirts, shawls. ("As seen on Oprah -- STRETCH BELTS, one size fits most!") Here are tabletop Christmas trees made from rusted metal (cute rust, not too orange, not too rusted). Here's a plaque that says "On Dasher, on Dancer, on Master, on Visa." Every booth is run by a self-made business with a darling name: Two Sisters and a Cat. Sacred Pause. The Pajama Princess. Experiences! Brushes & Bows ("a girly-girl boutique featuring head-to-toe apparel for the littlest princess and her tween sister!"). There is the Bead Lady, Annette's Touch of Class and Mommy Made It. There is 2 Cute, and there is 4 Home.

Much later, I wondered whether the power of these women -- this relentless optimism and appetite for the stuff of Christmas -- could be harnessed to save the American economy in a way retail no longer seems able to do? Forget Ben Bernanke, that Santa Claus and his federal elves. Call Tammie Parnell.

A stitch in time

'Neath the Wreath's most popular fundraiser -- tickets have been sold out for weeks -- is the American Girl luncheon and fashion show for daughters and their parents and grandparents.

Aged toddler to 10, the girls arrive dressed in sweet velveteen and plaid church dresses, their hair curled and done up in big bows. Much of the wardrobe comes from the American Girl catalogue. The American Girl doll phenomenon is its own universe of cute, appealing to parents who rave about its wholesome and educational appeal. These parents brandish American Girl as a silver cross against the nefarious, limo-riding, tarted-up Bratz dolls (who were at last vanquished in a copyright lawsuit last year).

Each doll represents an era in U.S. history -- the colonists, the pioneers, Native Americans, the big wars. Each comes with her own narrative of an adversity overcome by ingenuity and heart: In the Great Depression, an American Girl could never throw anything away. In the 1800s, an American Girl wore her nightgown all day, under her clothes, because she had no underwear. One American Girl managed to escape slavery via the Underground Railroad -- and can you believe it? -- she owned only one outfit.

"It's the sparkle, spirit, and style of American Girls, yesterday and today!" intones a recorded narration as the lights go down. A Junior League member and a teenage beauty pageant winner emcee. While each young model, carrying a doll, takes her little turn on the catwalk, we learn her American Girl back story. Here's Josefina, who lived on a ranch in northern New Mexico in the 1820s. She had to sew her own clothes.

"Who here knows how to sew their own clothes?" the emcee asks. "Raise your hands."

In a room of several hundred families, nobody raises a hand.

"Moms? Anyone here ever sew? Anyone have a sewing machine?"

No hands.

"Well then, you can just imagine how hard life was."

This is a guiding-light principle of Christmas in America: reminding the modern consumer how difficult the past was. Remember the cattle drivers and pioneers who lived here, on this spot where your Old Navy now sits. Remember the popcorn strung on a sad conifer that Papa cut from a hillside, down in the holler. An orange left by Santy Claus in your stockin'.

"This is now," Laura Ingalls Wilder tells us about her Christmas Eve in "Little House on the Prairie." "It can never be a long time ago."

But this is now: After having their pictures taken while clutching their American Girl dolls in front of 'Neath the Wreath's 14-foot-tall Christmas tree, each of these girls will leave the Plano civic center with Daddy and slip easily forward into present time, whipping out little pink phones as they climb into the family minivan.

Mommy and Mommy's friends stay to troll the booths at 'Neath the Wreath, woozy on Wine-a-Ritas. They search for charming new ways to hang stockings. They seek out brand new "vintage" ornaments. They sample ready-to-bake "homemade" cookie mixes, cider packets and potpourri concoctions, the very things that will soon fill their houses with some lost aroma of the real.