Every family has a tinsel person. Some folks hang it one careful strand at a time. Others just want it on the tree.
At Graceland, Priscilla Presley was the careful one. Elvis was not.
Priscilla, who married Elvis in Las Vegas in 1967 and had their daughter Lisa Marie the next year, shared the story with FOX 32 Chicago in December 2023. She was in the Chicago area for a holiday meet and greet benefiting GiGi’s Playhouse, which supports people with Down syndrome. She was also there to receive the Tommy Lasorda Humanitarian Award from the National Italian Sports Hall of Fame.
With the holidays coming, the talk turned to Christmas at Graceland. Was it Elvis’s favorite time of year?
“Yes, that was his special time,” she said.
Before we get to the tree, here’s Priscilla back at Graceland, sharing her memories of Elvis and the home they lived in together.
Priscilla shares her memories of Elvis at Graceland
So how did the two of them decorate?
They split the job. Priscilla handled the lights. Elvis handled the tinsel. And Elvis had a way of putting on tinsel that was all his own.
He didn’t hang it one strand at a time. He stood way back by the dining room table, balled it up and threw it at the tree.
Here’s how Priscilla tells it, word for word:
“He loved all the decorations. I would do the tree, I would put all the lightbulbs on the tree and the lights, and he would take the tinfoil and stand in the back where the dining room table is and curl it all up, squish it together and throw it. And I go, ‘No, that’s not how you put tinsel on,’ and so I would take it and put a little bit and he would just take it and throw the tinsel on.”
Yes, she called it tinfoil. And yes, the King of Rock n’ Roll was standing across the room lobbing wads of it at the Christmas tree while Priscilla tried to show him the proper way.
She’d add a little bit, neatly. He’d just keep throwing.
Anyone who has ever argued over how to decorate a tree knows exactly how that went.
Christmas wasn’t the only Graceland memory Priscilla shared. She said that when she walks through the front door today, her eyes still go to one spot.
“I walk in the front door and I look over where the piano room is at the end of the living room and I can just hear the music that he played after we’d come home from the theater at 2 in the morning.”
After a night at the movies, Elvis would head home and sit down at the piano. “He’d go back to Graceland and then play the piano and I still visualize that,” she said.
If you’d like to walk through those rooms with her, Priscilla gave TODAY a tour of Graceland, the house where all of this happened.
Priscilla gives a tour of Graceland
Priscilla has shared a lot of Graceland stories over the years, and this has to be one of the most fun. Once you picture Elvis tossing tinsel from back by the dining room table, it’s easy to understand why she says Christmas was his special time.