An Ode to the Holiday Popcorn Tin
After you’re full, what will do you with it? Because it’s almost a certainty in this season that someone, somewhere will give you a huge tin bulging with popcorn.
Southerners are known for their resourcefulness, for stretching a dollar and making the most of what we have. It’s no different during the holiday season, a time of year characterized by celebration and excess.
We love to joke about grandma’s sewing kit in the butter-cookie tin and storing leftovers in Cool Whip tubs. And while those storage devices were ever present during childhood, my family always took it a step further with the repurposing of one of my favorite holiday snack’s containers.
The ubiquitous holiday popcorn tin — whether decorated with snowmen and Christmas lights, Santa Claus’s team of flying reindeer ushering him to his next delivery location, or some other generic blend of classic Yuletide imagery — makes an appearance every December 25, courtesy of my grandma, Beth. But it maintains a presence long after Christmas has passed.
As surely as there will be homemade pigs in a blanket on the dining room table come Christmas afternoon, as surely as my grandmother will shed tears singing “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem” in church, and as surely as my parents’ TV will be tuned to “A Christmas Story” for the entirety of the 24 hours it airs that day, there will be a host of popcorn tins under the pre-lit tree alongside a variety of hastily wrapped gifts.
The ubiquitous holiday popcorn tin makes an appearance every December 25, courtesy of my grandma, Beth.
Far more than a vessel for butter, white cheddar and caramel popcorn, my family and I have found a variety of uses and misuses for the decorative tins.
Each Saturday after Thanksgiving, pizzas are ordered and a football game is playing on the TV at my grandmother’s home as her artificial tree is dragged down the stairs in a plastic tub. Alongside it are a bunch of popcorn tins from Christmases past, filled with ornaments — some store-bought, others handmade — and an angel tree topper whose yellow hair looks every bit as though she’s spent the last 11 months trapped in a popcorn tin.
I’ve been known to use a popcorn tin on Christmas morning, and the days that follow, as a footrest, a side table, even a drum. My brother, 12 years my junior, often used an empty popcorn tin as a seat during the hours he spent sitting in my childhood bedroom playing video games with me. And then there was the time my younger sister, a clumsy elementary school student, decided to stand on top of a popcorn tin and fell onto the wooden deck at our grandmother’s house, scratching her nose on a nail. She still has the scar.
When my grandmother is no longer here to share the joys of Christmas morning with us, her popcorn tins will be. I’ll carry on the tradition of buying them for my relatives.
Because it’s not about the popcorn or the incredibly useful tin. It’s about the experience, the feeling a holiday popcorn tin evokes when you wrestle off the ring of clear plastic covering the top and pop the lid off, crunching on bite after salty bite. That’s Christmas.
Blake Alsup is a writer and journalist from Tupelo, Mississippi, working as a reporter for the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal. He's a fan of popcorn, no matter the flavor or container.