Where is tinsel

Each year, emergency rooms fill with people who have fallen off ladders while hanging lights, or have been felled by falling Christmas trees, or have just done something stupid after too much eggnog. As The Wall Street Journal has reported, some people trace decorative tinsel to the 15th century, while others believe its use began in the mids, when people began to hang metal strips on their Christmas trees to pick up the surrounding candlelight.

Previously, tinsel—which gets its name from the Old French word estincele , meaning sparkle —had been made of silver, making it affordable to only a few. But at the turn of the century, alternatives made from cheaper metals like aluminum and copper turned a luxury good into a ubiquitous holiday decoration.

But each had its own disadvantages , too. Copper enjoyed a brief run as tinsel before World War I upped the demand; aluminum tinsel, meanwhile, proved itself to be incredibly flammable—not really a trait you want in something designed to reflect candlelight. In , the firm patented tinsel made from an alloy of tin and antimony. Other merchants went back to basics: At least one German silversmith still markets real silver lametta.

Most tinsel nowadays is made with fairly ordinary plastics. At Festive Productions , a family-owned firm in Wales, tinsel is made from polyvinyl chloride, says spokeswoman Cassie Hedlund.

Plastic tinsel typically gets its shiny finish from metallization, which is performed by heating and evaporating a metal such as aluminum under a vacuum and condensing it onto the plastic to leave a thin coating. Diehards like Waggoner miss the heft of classic tinsel.

Sales were weaker by comparison, so the company ceased all production of tinsel in Back in South Philly, Kinderman hears from so many old-school tinsel fans that she wishes she could join forces with chemists to try again for an inexpensive and safe replacement. Contact the reporter. Submit a Letter to the Editor for publication.

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Silver was very expensive though, so being able to do this was a sign that you were wealthy. Even though silver looked beautiful and sparkly to begin with, it tarnished quite quickly, meaning it would lose its lovely, bright appearance. So it was swapped for other materials like copper and tin. These metals were also cheaper, so it meant that more people could use them.

However, when World War I started in , metals like copper were needed for the war. Because of this, they couldn't be used for Christmas decorations as much, so a substitute was needed. It was swapped for aluminium, but this caused fire scares. So it was switched for lead, but that turned out to be poisonous! So people weren't having much luck picking a metal that would work. Today, tinsel is made from a material called polyvinyl chloride - or PVC for short.

The PVC is given a special treatment to make it nice and shiny, before it is shaped into bands which can be used on a tinsel machine. Check out the video above to see how it's made at the UK's biggest tinsel factory. When did tinsel actually come to the UK? The truth is that nobody actually knows.