New York City at Christmastime ~ The Metropolitan and Saks Fifth Avenue Light Show

For years now, we have been trying to get to NYC at Christmastime. This year we finally made it. This was not our first trip to NYC, but it was our first at Christmas. The trip was hard but amazing and worth the many difficulties. Truth be told, we are a special needs family, and when we are taken out of our routines, things can get dicey. We took the five of us and Grandma. New York City can be a very overwhelming place and was so much more crowded than I anticipated it would be when I was planning this trip. Our last trip to New York City was in the summer of 2016, and we were in a hotel on the west side of Midtown, which was much more residential and calm. This time we were in the heart of east Midtown very close to the Rockefeller Center, and it was much louder and absolutely packed with people. 

We drove to New York City. It is about an 11 hour drive, and we did it over two days. We arrived on day two at lunch time. Since we knew we couldn't get into our hotel or leave our vehicle for a few hours, we had made plans to visit The Metropolitan Museum of Art which has a parking lot. Wow! NYC traffic is intense. Hats off to my husband for driving in it. We got settled into the parking lot and visited the museum as planned. It was incredibly crowded. The artwork was inspiring and it was like visiting old friends that we have looked at so many times in books. You just can't replace standing in front of them in person. The Met is way too big to do in a day. We spent our time in the Impressionist, Old European Masters and Ancient Egypt sections. We did split up for a while, and the boys visited the armor section and Rebekah and I  visited the furniture sections. We looked for the bed we would sleep in if  we were Claudia in the book The Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Grandma spent her time with the masters. 

Goya

Rebekah in 2016

Now in 2022 

Van Gogh

Monet

Monet

The crowds, hunger and our limits on being able to take in the beauty of the Met pushed us out into the Upper East Side to find dinner a bit before the Met closed. We left our car in The Met parking lot and headed for a pizza place several blocks away. The pizza was good. We then went back to our car and moved to our hotel on 52nd street. We stayed at the Hilton Garden. They messed up our room assignment and ended up giving us three king size rooms with one of them being complementary. It worked out. Some of us were done for the night and completely worn out. Rebekah, Elijah and I decided that we wanted to walk up to see the Saks Fifth Avenue light show and window displays. It was a short walk and we loved the show which runs every 10 minutes.  The window displays were animated. It was fascinating to see window displays that were so fancy and unique. Rebekah had just completed her college course in Visual Merchandising, which concentrated a great deal on window displays which are lacking in our little city. Needless to say, she drank the window displays all in!

We then moved on to the H&M clothing store, which Rebekah works at in our city and is Elijah's favorite clothing store. This one was five stories tall and had an H&M Home included. We shopped until 10:30 pm. We wrapped up the night with a hot chocolate and pastry at Paris Baguette, which became our stomping grounds for breakfast or dessert most days. 

Blessings, Dawn