Each December, surrounded by wonderlands of white paper snowflakes, shiny 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 windows like dazzling frost. It flashes like sizzling, molten gold across the nail plates of younger women. It sparkles like pure precision-lower starlight on an ornament of a North American brown bear driving a automotive 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 automobile dealerships, and every sort of office — and outside these places, too — it shines. It glitters. It's glitter.

What is glitter? The best answer is one that may go away you slightly unhappy, but a minimum of with your confidence in comprehending primary physical properties intact. Glitter is made from glitter. Big glitter begets smaller glitter; smaller glitter gets all over the place, all glitter is unattainable to remove; now never ask this query again.

Ah, but in the event 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 trail to enlightenment is littered with trade secrets, vapors, aluminum ingots, C.I.A. ranges of obfuscation, the invisible areas of the visible spectrum, a unit of measurement expressed as "10-6 m" and also New Jersey.

Humans, even people who don’t like glitter, like glitter. We're drawn to shiny things in the same wild manner our ancestors were overcome by a compulsion to forage for honey. A idea that has found favor among research psychologists (supported, partially, by a examine that monitored infants’ enthusiasm for licking plates with glossy finishes) is that our attraction to glitter is derived from an innate want to seek out recent water.

Glitter as a contactable product — or more accurately, an assemblage of contactable products ("glitter" is a mass noun; specifically, it's a granular combination, like "rice") — is an invention so recent it’s barely defined. The Oxford English Dictionary principally concerns itself with explaining glitter as an intangible type of sparkly light. Until the invention within the twentieth century of the modern 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 centuries, does not change into glitter when reduce into small pieces. It turns into "bits of tinsel." The tiny, shiny, decorative particles of glitter we are aware of in the present day are popularly believed to have originated on a farm in New Jersey within the Nineteen Thirties, when a German immigrant invented a machine to cut scrap material into extraordinarily small pieces. (Curiously, he didn't start filing patents for machines that cut foil into what he called "slivers" until 1961.) The particular events that led to the initial dispersal of glitter are nebulous; in true glitter fashion, unexpectedly, it was simply everywhere.

A December 1942 article in The Times — probably the primary 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 interchange Christmas candles, which the wartime Military had banned after sunset — along 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, reworking them into floating U-boat targets.

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