Happy Holiday Traditions from Sparkling New York City

Continuing our global educational tour, we detour from our alphabetical list of cities to celebrate the holidays in New York City. In a normal year, from Thanksgiving to New Year, this city is both sparkling and very crowded.

The Rockefeller Christmas Tree at the picture’s center has its origin in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. In December 1931, a group of construction workers pooled the little money they had in placing a tree on the site of the Rockefeller Center which was just starting construction. The 20-foot tree (6 meters) was adorned with homemade garlands from the workers’ families as a symbol of hope of a better tomorrow. Lighting the tree as a tradition started in 1933.

The invention of Christmas lights is credited to Edward Johnson and Thomas Edison who displayed his holiday lights for the first in 1882 at his home on Fifth Avenue. Multiple other Christmas traditions have their origin in New York. Clement Clark Moore published his poem which became known as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” from this city. Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer was a Robert May New York City creation.

New York city was founded by Dutch settlers in the 17th century who brought with them the celebration of the Feast of Saint Nicholas from which the American version of Santa Claus was born. Today, one of most magical places to meet Santa is at Macy’s flagship store on 34th street in New York. A holiday tradition since the 1860s, the legend of this Santa Claus reached Hollywood in 1947 with one of my favorite movies, ‘Miracle on 34th Street’. Every year, more than 250,000 people visit Macy’s Santa in his enchanting workshop (by appointment only as we discovered during our holiday visit).

We are not living in normal times this year, but as this virtual tour illustrates, traditions bind us to the past and future, and remind us all that it’s a small world after all. Happy Holidays.

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