These days people assume tinsel is what it looks like – a lanky, gaudy length of shiny plastic. Purely decorative, with no history or function. But this was not always so. A long time ago, pre-industrial humans had a very different relationship with tinsel.
If you wanted to adorn your home with a piece of tinsel – in order to broadcast your spirit of "fun" and "festivity" – then you had to catch it first. Catch it, and kill it. In those days, fun was no laughing matter.
For, indeed, tinsel was a living creature. Decorative tinsel as we know it now is a mere plastic replica. A simulacrum. A shadow of the noble beast it imitates. But back then, tinsel roamed the wild woods, slithering quickly through the undergrowth, dining on mushrooms and small mice. They were easy to spot – the shiny fur was a dead giveaway – but tricky to catch. Even if you ran as fast as you could, the tinsel might still escape. Only especially talented athletes could catch them with pure physical speed. As such, most people had to resort to other methods.
Outwitting the tinsel was a simple matter of building a tinsel replica, from straw, cloth and shining inks, dressing up your replica real nice, and then manipulating it like a puppet. You'd cover your whole body in leaves, and crouch down in the mud. And you'd tug on the string attached to your fake tinsel, jostling it around in hopes of attracting a real tinselbeast.
This apparently worked, at least sometimes. There are many depictions – folktales, old songs, etchings – of tinsel-hunters as exciting adventurers. Probably it was more boring than that. But, hey, something in that activity must have struck a chord with human society, because as we moved forward, built houses and railroads, distilled whisky and petroleum, we kept the trappings of tinsel with us. Our tinsel replicas, which we hang around the house each festive season.
So next time you see a length of tinsel hanging limp from a tree, imagine the creature it might have been. Imagine the wild tinsel, roaming free, all those years ago. Try to remember those days of our ancestors, when tinsel was not something you bought in a shop, but a creature that had to die so that the spirit of Christmas might live.