The 12 Days of Donkmas - Tinsel

Day 3 - Tinsel

Every family has its own unique way of decorating their Christmas tree.  In my family, we flourished the limbs of our tree with heirloom ornaments that had been collected over the decades, stretching back all the way to the beginning of the twentieth century.  Of course, you couldn’t actually SEE any of these heirlooms, or the tree itself for that matter, due to the fact that we also decorated our tree with enough tinsel to choke a young humpback whale.

I’m not sure if this tradition began in a much earlier branch of the Donk family tree, or if it started with my sister and me, but it sure was a godawful one.  The mayhem would begin once all of the ornaments were securely on the tree.  What seemed like 8 tons of shiny silver tinsel would be backed up to our house by a dump truck and the fun would begin, as my sister and I poured on gob after gob of the stuff until our tree looked like a pointy disco ball.  Perhaps the funniest part of this annual fiasco was how my bossy older sister would tell me that I was putting too much on or that my work was too “clumpy,” when the fact was that the end result of her efforts were just as horrific as my own.

In the days heading up to Christmas morning, the tinsel was like some insidious plague in our household, finding its way everywhere: in our hair, under rugs, into food, stuck to the TV set by static, and of course poking out of our cats’ feces like a crazed head of hair.

Above: Who Knew Cat Poop Could Be So…Sparkly

But the fun didn’t end with Christmas, as tinsel would continue to inexplicably turn up throughout the house well past the 4th of July; no amount of vacuuming seemed to tame the shiny scourge. 

I’m proud to say that I have left this tradition behind in favor of Mrs. Donk’s more antiseptic, department-store display approach to Christmas tree decorating.  But the tradition lives on in my sister’s household, where every Christmas a glimmer twinkles in my eye and I relive Christmases past as I gaze upon her tree as it stoops there, sagging under the weight of hundreds of pounds of tinsel.