Help, help to

A sentence from a recent post:

[Dieter] Rams on camera is elegantly informal and always curmudgeonly — a critic of the consumer culture his designs [helped? helped to?] establish.

It’s a rare day that I don’t have a reason to open Garner’s Modern English Usage. Here’s an answer:

In most contexts, the better practice is to use a bare infinitive after help (if the choice is between a fully expressed infinitive [with to] and a bare one [without to]).

Examples follow. And finally:

The bare-infinitive form after help overtook the to-form in the late 1960s and remains more than twice as common with various verbs.

Helped to still sounds better to me. I’ll put that down to a dowdy ear. Everybody knows a turkey and some mistletoe help to make the season bright.