Hank Stuever went looking for Christmas in an unlikely place: Frisco, Texas, an exurb of Dallas that is bursting at the seams with restaurants, retail and Republicans. Not necessarily in that order.

From August 2006 to February 2007, he chronicled the lives and the peculiarities of this Bible Belt community, living, worshiping, decorating, exercising, eating and—maybe most importantly —shopping among them.

The result is “Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present,” a yuletide journey that reminds us about everything that is wrong with the commercialization of a supposedly religious holiday. It debunks the myths of the holiday and straightens out the picture on our never-quite-accurate nostalgic images.

Not exactly the kind of book to read by the hearth with Nat King Cole playing in the background on Christmas Eve. But in Steuver’s hands, it is immensely entertaining. The longtime Washington Post reporter plumbs the depths of a lot of holidays past for a fast-paced examination of what Dec. 25 has done to Americans and vice versa.

Along the way, he found Tammie Parnell, a married mother of two who supplements her family income by decorating other people’s houses because they don’t have the time or energy and whose favorite word is “phenomenal”; Caroll Cavazos, a single mother struggling financially, spiritually and emotionally who takes part in the Black Friday tradition of spending too much money on things you don’t need and presents your loved ones won’t appreciate nearly as much as you wish they would; and Jeff Trykoski, a computer geek whose life is defined by a Clark Griswold-like fascination with having so many lights on his house that people drive from miles around just to gawk, but who therefore can’t make time to visit his own family.

The book is as refreshing as it is disturbing, as hilarious as it is unexpectedly poignant, as life-affirming as it is pass-the-Prozac depressing.

You got it: The book feels an awful lot like Christmas.

In the introduction, Stuever writes that he wanted the book to be about Christmas and everything else: “Our weird economy, our modern sense of home, our oft-broken hearts, and all our notions of God. The biggies.”

Stuever is not a practicing Christmasite, having decided long ago to sit on the sidelines of the annual event/holiday season. He briefly revisits the Oklahoma Christmases of his youth, which at times sound like scenes that inspired Norman Rockwell. Eventually, he just stopped celebrating in what we think of as traditional ways. But this is no introspective self-analysis of why he doesn’t get in the spirit; it’s all about those of us who do, as seen through the eyes of a confirmed cynic.

There is no better place to start a book like this than on Black Friday in the plaza of a big box store. It’s there that Stuever meets Caroll and her daughter Marissa, who are waiting to be two of those people we either are or are glad we are not. Experiencing it that way seems to give Stuever a glimpse into a place he didn’t expect to go.

“Real lives are being lived here. People are shopping, but they also are falling in love or kissing a child. They are sharing in a perception of glittery wealth. Many of them sincerely believe that the huge televisions they are clamoring for this morning will bring their families together in a more satisfying way. The restaurants, to me, no longer represent tastelessness. The plastic toys people seek for their children hold true wonder. In this carbed out consumerismo are places and moments of true bonding, places to be seen and to see others, to simply exist.”

Some of the events he witnesses along his journey sound positively absurd, unless you have seen these things yourself and you know you have. The one that had me laughing uncontrollably for 5 minutes was his telling of an annual children’s shopping event known as the “Merry Main Street Holiday Store” in which merchants set up inside vacant stores in a plaza and kids go in to shop for cheap trinkets to give their families, replicating the adult experience to come.

“The kids all stagger out of the Kids Holiday Store with a look of exhaustion, having waited an hour or more to get in to pick over whatever’s left of the merchandise and make their way through checkout and gift wrap. Here you have the entire story of retail Christmas in America, in make-believe microcosm: ‘Everything sucked,’ one boy said to his father. ‘You won’t like what I got you.’ ” ‘Did you find all sorts of good stuff?’ one mother gushes to her son and daughter.‘I can’t remember,’ the son replies.”

Stuever knows he can’t get the full picture of life in this God-fearing community without standing shoulder to shoulder with the believers in a mega-church, complete with the former body-builder pastor and his seemingly perfect wife and kids.

On the topic of megachurches, he writes: “I can tell you they’re irresistibly fascinating, trendy, skeevy and ridiculous. To really get it, you have to go more than once. You have to go the next Sunday, and then another Sunday, and soon enough, something about them becomes endearingly earnest.”

So it goes with the book. Stuever moves in, maybe to mock, and comes out a little less cynical, a little more understanding. When he becomes a fly on the wall while the Trykoskis open their gifts, he sees through the unbridled carnage of torn paper and cursory thank yous to that one moment when a gift brings as much joy to the giver as the getter.

“Moments like this make a family a family,” he writes, sounding very much like a line in a Hallmark card that, if he heard it, he probably would have greeted with a smirk.

That’s not a criticism. Stuever is a reporter first and every good reporter knows you can’t let your biases get in the way of the story. Along the way, the very good ones even learn that maybe those biases were overdue for a little tweaking.

Tinsel:A Search for America’s Christmas Present

By Hank Stuever

Houghton Mifflin

Harcourt

352 pages, $24

Bruce Andriatch is the suburban editor of The News.