Word: tinsel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Nixon eras are comfort food. Seeing A Charlie Brown Christmas, The Little Drummer Boy, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (even if it does portray Santa Claus early on as a grouchy bigot) can raise as many childhood memories of the holiday as tinsel and peppermint. And so we buy the DVDs for our kids, ensuring another generation of royalties for the stop-motion animation team of Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass...
...theaters and striking Hollywood writers dampen the holiday spirit, toys have gotten scary, gas prices trudge ever upward, the dollar slips ever lower, and the credit crisis makes people feel poorer even if they aren't in foreclosure. One marketing firm predicts a "blue Christmas," citing slumping sales of tinsel as a leading indicator; 27% of shoppers say they'll be spending less this year...
...Fred, in a holiday jape from the director of Wedding Crashers and one of the writers of Cars: that should be funny. Except, no. The laughs come too rarely, the sentiment is tricked up, and this attempt at a Christmas perennial wilts faster than a cheap balsam choked with tinsel...
While some of the Houses have stuck with the tried and true this holiday season—with dining halls adorned in colored lights, tinsel, wreaths, and ribbons—Cabot House has outdone them all with a nine-foot aluminum pole. The unadorned pole is one of the many trappings of the secular holiday Festivus, popularized by the sitcom “Seinfeld” during a 1997 episode entitled “The Strike.” Frank Costanza, father of the recurring character George Costanza, claims to have invented the holiday as a protest against the commercialization...
Sentimentalists will object here that shopkeepers’ motives for polluting their storefront displays with tinsel, holly, and plastic candelabras are an expression of holiday good cheer, perverse financial considerations be damned. That’s a very pleasant thought, but it defies common sense. This isn’t someone’s living room—it’s the marketplace, and the only warmth that matters is that of customers’ grabbing hands. Storeowners aren’t trying to cheer you up or brighten your day; they’re trying to pander...