We may just be done celebrating Halloween, but I know it’s not too early to wish you a merry Christmas, because the shopping mall told me so. The book you need to read to get ready for the season is Hank Stuever’s lively “Tinsel.”

It examines what Christmas means to contemporary Americans through the eyes of three families in Frisco, Texas, which is like the rest of America, only more so. Stuever says he wrote the book to explore the question: “Who are we now that we live in this world where so many people for so long had unlimited access to just about anything they wanted?”

It’s enough to make one long for the caves of the ascetic Desert Fathers, or at least to get sozzled with grinchy atheist Christopher Hitchens. Stuever is both a magnificent prose stylist and a compelling storyteller, and his richly detailed reportage rings true to North Texas life. This will no doubt make “Tinsel” a local bestseller, if a highly controversial one.

But the writer’s account of our gaudy Christmas present recalls Trollope’s withering judgment of Disraeli’s novels: “The glory has been the glory of pasteboard, and the wealth has been a wealth of tinsel.” The book doesn’t judge; it reveals. And what it shows is that people who throw themselves with such severe gusto into celebrating Christmas, especially through the communal ritual of shopping, miss the point of the thing entirely.

Tinsel follows its families through a trio of Christmas seasons. One couple, Jeff and Bridgette Trykoski, are locally famous for their spectacular home Christmas lights display. But Jeff’s obsession with having the biggest Yuletide lollapalooza in town can’t disguise the fact that he makes his mother cry by refusing to observe Christmas with his extended family. (“We’ve explained it to my parents over and over. We have to be at our house for Christmas, because of the lights.”)

Another family, the Parnells, spends its Christmases dealing with the seasonal tornado that is Tammie _ wife, mother and Tasmanian devil of decoration. She works herself silly prettifying other people’s McMansions for the holidays, so much so that her husband feels she neglects their family. For Tammie, it’s all about a search for the “total moment,” the recovery of an episode from a childhood Christmas that lives in her poetic memory as timeless and perfect. Yet she’s so busy trying to re-create this lost Rosebud by force of will and expenditure of cash that she’s blind to the life she actually leads.

The Christmas excess documented in “Tinsel” is indeed wretched, but who _ Mennonites, you’re excused _ can deny that many of us are complicit?

The Christmas pageant Stuever observes at a Frisco megachurch promising “a state-of-the-art multimedia worship experience” epitomizes his point. In the onstage finale, the church gathered Victorian townspeople, kids dressed like presents, the Holy Family and a bloodied adult Jesus carrying his cross, all singing their hearts out in a holiday extravaganza that screams, “More! More! More!”

Hitch, old boy, make mine a double.

“Tinsel” made me wonder about the social role Christianity plays in North Texas. As a believer, one of the aspects of life here I cherish the most is how much piety is a part of life. But the “Tinsel” Christmas occurs in a consumer culture that has effectively hollowed out the Christian religion, yet still craves ritual transcendence.

“Tinsel” is too much fun to be a scolding, book-length “Keep Christ in Christmas” lecture, which doesn’t interest its irreligious author anyway. But the book is haunted by the ghosts of Christmases past, when wants were simpler, and folks found it easier to cherish each other, and the Christ child, because nobody expected life to be a state-of-the-art multimedia worship experience.

It’s good to feast joyfully at Christmas. But if you never fast, if you don’t know the meaning of enough, feasting can’t help being disordered and gross. When our wealth makes every day a holiday, how do you find the humility, stillness and gratitude required to live Christmas in the proper spirit? Odd, but one of the most modest but meaningful Christmases I ever spent was in secular Holland, far from the U.S. Christmas-industrial complex.

Stuever calls himself a “Christmas loser,” meaning that he no longer practices his Catholic faith or gets caught up in seasonal thrills.

I wonder if he’s missing much. To paraphrase a noted rabbi, it may be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter rightly into the Christmas season. Despite the recession, most of us remain rich men in a philosophical sense, and can’t imagine living any other way. That is our poverty.

• Rod Dreher