I had just moved back to New Jersey in 2006 after a long campaign of failure in Pennsylvania. I was back living with my parents and when Christmastime came around that year, I was pretty depressed. My mother had noticed and asked me to come over one morning early to “sort things out”. When I showed up she immediately put me in the car and wouldn’t answer where when I asked her where we were going. I figured it out as we got on the Turnpike. My mother is a survivor of Brooklyn in the 80’s – she only gets on the turnpike to go to NYC. She told me that when she was a young girl every year her mother would take her to see the windows near Rockefeller Center, and it always made the season feel more magical. I had never been to see the window dressings, but I had seen their opulence in magazines. We got to the crowded streets of New York and stood in front of the most beautiful displays. Snowflakes, Santa Claus, people bundled up and carrying shopping bags, the tree lit up, towering over the crowds in Rockefeller plaza. We even got to see a man propose to his fiance at the Christmas tree. She said yes. I came away from that day with a certainty that there is no place on Earth like New York during Christmas.
