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Each December, surrounded by wonderlands of white paper snowflakes, bright red winterberries, and forests of green conifers reclaiming their ancestral territory from inside the nation’s living rooms and hotel lobbies, children and adults delight to see the true harbinger of the holidays: aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate.

Aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate settles over store home windows like dazzling frost. It flashes like hot, molten gold across the nail plates of young women. It sparkles like pure precision-cut starlight on an ornament of a North American brown bear driving a automobile towing a camper van. Indeed, in Clement Clarke Moore’s seminal Christmas Eve poem, the eyes of Saint Nicholas himself are said to twinkle like aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate (I’m paraphrasing). In houses and malls and schools and synagogues and banks and hospitals and fire stations and hardware stores and breweries and car dealerships, and each type of office — and outside those places, too — it shines. It glitters. It’s glitter.

What’s glitter? The simplest reply is one that will leave you slightly unhappy, but no less than together with your confidence in comprehending fundamental physical properties intact. Glitter is made from glitter. Big glitter begets smaller glitter; smaller glitter gets all over the place, all glitter is inconceivable to remove; now never ask this query again.

Ah, but in case you, like an impertinent child in search of a logistical timetable of Santa Claus’ nocturnal intercontinental journey, demand a more detailed definition — a word of warning: The path to enlightenment is littered with trade secrets, vapors, aluminum ingots, C.I.A. ranges of obfuscation, the invisible areas of the seen spectrum, a unit of measurement expressed as “10-6 m” and in addition New Jersey.

People, even people who don’t like glitter, like glitter. We are drawn to shiny things in the same wild approach our ancestors have been overcome by a compulsion to forage for honey. A concept that has found favor among analysis psychologists (supported, in part, by a examine that monitored infants’ enthusiasm for licking plates with glossy finishes) is that our attraction to sparkle is derived from an innate need to seek out fresh water.

Glitter as a contactable product — or more accurately, an assemblage of contactable merchandise (“glitter” is a mass noun; specifically, it’s a granular combination, like “rice”) — is an invention so current it’s barely defined. The Oxford English Dictionary principally issues itself with explaining glitter as an intangible type of sparkly light. Till the invention in the 20th century of the trendy craft substance, one could either observe something’s glitter (the glitter of glass), or hold something that glittered (like, say, ground up glass). Tinsel, which has existed for hundreds of years, does not become glitter when minimize into small pieces. It turns into “bits of tinsel.” The tiny, shiny, decorative particles of glitter we’re aware of today are popularly believed to have originated on a farm in New Jersey in the Thirties, when a German immigrant invented a machine to cut scrap material into extraordinarily small pieces. (Curiously, he did not begin filing patents for machines that lower foil into what he called “slivers” till 1961.) The specific occasions that led to the initial dispersal of glitter are nebulous; in true glitter fashion, swiftly, it was simply everywhere.

A December 1942 article in The Instances — presumably the first point out in this newspaper of the stuff — advised New York Metropolis residents that pitchers of evergreen boughs, placed of their windows for the winter holidays, would provide “additional scintillation” if “sprinkled with dime-store ‘glitter’ or mica.” The pitchers had been to switch Christmas candles, which the wartime Military had banned after sunset — together with neon signs in Occasions Sq. and the light from the Statue of Liberty’s torch — after figuring out that the nighttime glow threw offshore Allied vessels into silhouette, transforming them into floating U-boat targets.

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