Sno-Globe Dreams
In my memories Christmas and New York City are synonymous. And cold. In Queens, we hung big bright bulbs of covered lights around the picture window in the living room of our apartment. And put up a real tree on Christmas Eve.
Then there was always Manhattan, which we called “the city.”
In very early days going to the city meant visiting my Aunt Binie on West 14th Street and Uncle George and his family in the apartment in the next building. It also meant meeting her on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day at the elevated subway line and having my father drive her to our place for dinner and celebrations and then driving her back home, her sitting in the back seat with my sister and me on either side, sleepily hugging the soft warm sleeves of her fur coat which smelled so sweetly of L’Aimont. When we were older, wherever we drove from mid-November til Little Christmas we’d count Christmas lights on each side of the car to see who could spot the most
It was also going to Rockefeller Center to see the huge tree and the ice skaters and illuminated angels sounding trumpets. It meant a bright kaleidoscope of decorated stores and avenues, passing the Air Japan window on Fifth Avenue and the Christmas tree made entirely of colorful origami birds. Also, looking at the big snowflake hung over the intersection of 57th and Broadway.
Later it meant gleeful browsing with my friends in the stores of the West Village, loving the pine smell from the corner pop-up Christmas Tree lots where enterprising men in suede jackets were ready to strike a bargain—strictly cash.
As an adult living in Chelsea, shopping for presents became a meandering walk down Broadway and once again ending up in the West Village, where there was an empty lot flea market that could cover my whole list in a single, blustery afternoon.
Christmastime in the city, a phrase from “Silver Bells,” conjures memories of windy cold, soft snowflakes, walking through the Village streets with the sweet fragrance of wood burning in fireplaces. It was a break from the brisk chill with cappuccino and cannoli at the Peacock Caffe, feeling warm and cozy looking out frosted window panes at the Greenwich Street shoppers.
One snowy night it was a sumptuous dinner in some restaurant on West 10thStreet near a roaring fire feeling warmed and well-served, everything decorated for Christmas. It was also a walk to brunch one Sunday where I passed elegant row houses and caught a glimpse through a floor to ceiling window of a Christmas Tree with white lights and red bows, a nearby grand piano, and a spiral staircase with mahogany banister ringed with holly and ribbons rising dizzyingly out of sight up to the second floor.
I have a vague memory of a holiday party with a large, lively group of people at the Grammercy Park building that housed the Poetry Society of New York. I was alone and dressed in my best Christmas outfit. Others had dressed for the occasion, too and I began to mingle among them sampling canapes and wine, in a party mood, although I didn’t know a soul. During the evening an older gentleman sat at a piano and we all sang holiday carols and around it.
It isn’t just that New York was a great place to be during the Christmas season, in many ways it was the only place to be because it takes a New York to really do Christmas well.
How are so many of my glimpses simple flashbacks to New York City, specifically, Greenwich Village? It’s as if they’re sitting on a shelf encased in a glass snow globe being ignored and overlooked until the light slants a certain way and I remember they’re there. I take the globe and shake it up so tiny white flakes swirl around an urban landscape, shaking those memories loose.
The very locale is my inheritance on my father’s side, going back generations of native New Yorkers who were born, grew up and went to work within the streets that border the Village, many of them working at the Washington Avenue Post Office.
It never surprised me that that part of the world felt like home even when I lived elsewhere; its buildings and streets even invaded so many of my dreams.
But as I said to a friend residing in Florida who was reminiscing about the city not too long ago, the New York in those stories we cherish so much now exists only in our memories.
I fear it has become another casualty of pandemic panic and vaccine mandate zealotry. And I wonder what’s left to paint the memories and dreams of those who are walking its sidewalks this season, or if indeed they dare to dream at all