There’s nothing like New York City in December. There is a rising holiday spirit that infuses a cultural intensity and creates an infusion of goodwill like no other place on earth.

I Love New York!

New Yorkers are friendlier than ever in December. The shopping is cheap and plentiful. The feeling of making it together in the middle of the greatest city in the universe — in the center of the world — is something that cannot be purchased or implied: You have to live it, to know it!

35 Comments

  1. Walking down fifth avenue is a wonderful memory. You could spend $100,000 in a two minute walk down the street.

  2. Hey Anne!
    In no other city in the world do paupers walk the same street at the same time as multi-billionaires. It is one of the great assets of the city but also one of its saddest realities.

  3. The amazing fact is they don’t kill each other in class warfare. They fight through the police but straight confrontations haven’t happened yet.

  4. The inevitable is coming, don’t you think? How hard would it be for the South Bronx and Harlem to band together to make war on the 5th Avenue elite? There aren’t enough cops in the city to put down that sort of economic insurrection.

  5. There are little revolutions. Purse snatching. Muggings. Beating up for a cell phone. Most of it in inter-community violence. When they finally turn to where the money is then it’s going to be a totally different game.

  6. Right, Anne! There will be fights on the streets and in the subways. The key is organization. The rich owe their organization to the power structure of the city and the police force. The poor have no real leadership or organization head except, some may argue, local drug gangs.

  9. Hi David,
    December in Chicago is a pretty marvelous time as well.
    People hold elevator doors open for people rushing in at the last second. Smiling folks wish each other Happy Holidays, Happy Hanukkah, or Merry Christmas. I even heard some older women saying “God Bless” to well wishers with sincerely smiles on their faces.
    Walking from the parking garage to the Daley Center the other day, I chatted with a stranger who was heading in the same direction about how empty the city seemed because millions seemingly were at home or on vacation.
    Even though it has been warm and hasn’t felt like a typical December, the same spirit of happiness felt in NYC shines through in Chicago and its surrounding areas as well!

  10. Hi David,
    December in Chicago is a pretty marvelous time as well.
    People hold elevator doors open for people rushing in at the last second. Smiling folks wish each other Happy Holidays, Happy Hanukkah, or Merry Christmas. I even heard some older women saying “God Bless” to well wishers with sincerely smiles on their faces.
    Walking from the parking garage to the Daley Center the other day, I chatted with a stranger who was heading in the same direction about how empty the city seemed because millions seemingly were at home or on vacation.
    Even though it has been warm and hasn’t felt like a typical December, the same spirit of happiness felt in NYC shines through in Chicago and its surrounding areas as well!

  11. Thanks for the report from Chicago, Chris! I’m happy to know at least once a year we can all seem to come together in a common goal of courtesy and friendliness to make our communities a better place. The trick of the lesson is to make that feeling last all year round!

  12. Thanks for the report from Chicago, Chris! I’m happy to know at least once a year we can all seem to come together in a common goal of courtesy and friendliness to make our communities a better place. The trick of the lesson is to make that feeling last all year round!

  13. Sounds like you had a good morning Christmas Shopping, people watching and soaking up the atmosphere. Shame it wont last long and it will all be back to normal.

  14. Sounds like you had a good morning Christmas Shopping, people watching and soaking up the atmosphere. Shame it wont last long and it will all be back to normal.

  15. Yes, our favorite thing to do is to walk up and down 5th Avenue and look at all the decorations. Then we come back home and walk around the neighborhood and enjoy the lights and displays people create on their lawns. We’ve never lived in a neighborhood on the East Coast that put so much civic pride in decorating the outside of a home for EVERY holiday! It makes for great fun.

  16. Yes, our favorite thing to do is to walk up and down 5th Avenue and look at all the decorations. Then we come back home and walk around the neighborhood and enjoy the lights and displays people create on their lawns. We’ve never lived in a neighborhood on the East Coast that put so much civic pride in decorating the outside of a home for EVERY holiday! It makes for great fun.

  17. I must asmit I did enjoy the Christmas lights display in Paris while we were there – fantastic.
    In the UK we are taking a while to catch up with the USA habit of decorating the outside as much as the inside !

  18. I must asmit I did enjoy the Christmas lights display in Paris while we were there – fantastic.
    In the UK we are taking a while to catch up with the USA habit of decorating the outside as much as the inside !

  19. It is a sort of garish tradition to be so “out there” decorating your homes. It gets quickly competitive. It is nice seeing someone with an aesthetic charm, though, when it comes to lighting.
    Paris sounds wonderful!

  20. It is a sort of garish tradition to be so “out there” decorating your homes. It gets quickly competitive. It is nice seeing someone with an aesthetic charm, though, when it comes to lighting.
    Paris sounds wonderful!

  25. Hi David and Nicola,
    Speaking of Christmas lighting …
    I was looking through the restrictive covenants for my soon-to-be new neighborhood and they have a restriction on over-the-top holiday lighting. Any displays must be “tasteful.” Of course, there’s no definition of tasteful, so I guess that will be up to the Holiday Lighting Committee to determine whenever the homeowner’s association starts up. 🙂
    I put my Christmas lights out and every device I have has half of the lights burned out. I have a white outdoor Christmas tree, but I’m not lighting it since it looks strange without all of its working lights. And, since we’ve been cleaning out old items to make the old house more presentable, I didn’t want to buy a new one that would end up being donated to Goodwill in a week or so.

  26. Hi David and Nicola,
    Speaking of Christmas lighting …
    I was looking through the restrictive covenants for my soon-to-be new neighborhood and they have a restriction on over-the-top holiday lighting. Any displays must be “tasteful.” Of course, there’s no definition of tasteful, so I guess that will be up to the Holiday Lighting Committee to determine whenever the homeowner’s association starts up. 🙂
    I put my Christmas lights out and every device I have has half of the lights burned out. I have a white outdoor Christmas tree, but I’m not lighting it since it looks strange without all of its working lights. And, since we’ve been cleaning out old items to make the old house more presentable, I didn’t want to buy a new one that would end up being donated to Goodwill in a week or so.

  28. Chris!
    You need to publish that list of new neighborhood restrictions in an article here and analyze their reason for being! In The Olden Days we didn’t need such lists because people knew how to properly behave!
    You made the right choice about your Christmas display! Next year you’ll do it better from the start!

  30. I would love to see the definitions of “tasteful” too.
    We had an interesting discussion about christmas lights and global warming earlier – watch out for them being banned in a town near you.

  31. There are people in some parts of the USA who spend $79,000.00 a month on electricity to light their houses up with lights. Now that’s foolish. That should be outlawed!

  32. Hi David,
    There are some interesting things in the restrictive covenants — mostly to keep things looking nice and neat around the neighborhood. For example, there are regulations about the type of fencing to be used and height, etc. If one lives near the water, the fencing rules are different because they don’t want the view of the various water features blocked. (We ended up buying a lot that is near the perimeter of the subdivision, so we have a fence between us and a wooded area that is owned by the homeowners association and will be maintained by them. 🙂 )
    The most interesting rule is a no sex offenders regulation. If someone is listed on the state’s or the sheriff’s list, they can’t move into the neighborhood.
    One regulation that helped us make our lot choice was a “non-monotony” clause. The water lot we were looking at already had too many houses of a particular type we liked in the vicinity, so we decided to select a lot where we’d be the first and thus set the tone for the subsequent houses.

Comments are closed.