Word: tinsel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Penney and Kohl's aren't just hanging holiday tinsel to get customers to fill up their Christmas stockings. By adding exclusive-to-them designer labels and partnering with upscale sellers, they are redeveloping the middle market, a segment once thought lost forever in the crush between the high and low end. "Both JCPenney and Kohl's have come to understand what their shoppers expect: great prices every day, ease of shopping and an exciting store," says Wendy Liebmann, founder of WSL Strategic Retail, a consultancy that publishes quarterly surveys on how Americans shop. "They're working hard to address...
...that time again. Calculate your celebrity intelligence quotient with this week's quiz on Tinsel Town's crop of wheelers, dealers and charmingly irritating philanthropists...
...Iranians have celebrated the Twelfth Imam's birthday for centuries, but it was only after the 1979 Islamic Revolution that the holiday was celebrated by draping Tehran in tinsel and colored lights, much like a Western city during Christmas. The government honors the Mahdi's birthday with more fanfare than it treats other arguably more prominent Muslim holidays. This year, out on a short trip for groceries, I ate Mahdi birthday cookies on one street, and was offered a cold fruit drink at a nearby square. The result of this government-nurtured devotion to the Mahdi has transformed the piety...
...school, hops a freight train and winds up tending to the menagerie of the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, a third-rate Depression-era traveling circus. What goes on under the big top is nothing compared with the show backstage. In a sawdust-and-tinsel novel reminiscent of Robertson Davies, Jacob nurses giraffes, bunks with a surly dwarf, falls in love with a sexy horsewoman, gets life lessons from a singularly intelligent elephant and learns what to do when the band plays Stars and Stripes Forever: it's circus code for disaster, so run like hell...
...Yuletide decorations at the White House are simpler this year. The gaudy tinsel and the 155,000 lights of 2004 have given way to a more natural look of Christmas trees decorated with white lilies and pink roses that are replaced as they wilt. Guests at the holiday parties are noticing a different tone to George Bush too. He has never liked the 26 receptions, the thousands of punishing or limp handshakes, the graceless requests for souvenir cuff links with the presidential seal. But at some of the smaller gatherings this year, Bush has freed himself from the photo line...