Just as the first chilly gusts of wind arrive to remind us that harsh winter days are ahead, New York City puts on its December finery, showing off with light and color to distract us from the season of dark and cold ahead. While the traditional pleasures of the department store windows, Rockefeller Center decorations, and Radio City or NYCB Nutcracker shows always delight, one of my favorite things about this month is walking down residential streets and seeing the lights we have put up in our own homes – to warm ourselves but also send warmth out to others passing by. The following photos are from the 2016 holiday season (see my post in 2015 here and my post from 2014 in Dyker Heights here):

The Rockefeller tree by day (wonderful) and night (spectacular).

Skating at Rock Center.

The Radio City Christmas Spectacular finale and living nativity (love those camels!).

Inside the Art Deco masterpiece, Radio City Music Hall.

Saks Fifth Avenue, seen from Rock Center.

Heralding angels leading up to the Rock Center tree.

Downtown Brooklyn.

A private townhouse in the East 60’s.

It’s hard to capture the lights of the city at night with an iPhone, but I do feel that nighttime is when the city is at its best – and this is particularly true for December, where we push back the darkness as best we can with arrays of light. I absolutely love the poem that Travel and Leisure Magazine commissioned from New York poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips, A Tale of Two Cities:

City above the city and city
Below the city. The diners, theaters,
Dance spots and dives all late-light strobed life
Sumptuous as solitude that knows it’s not
Loneliness like the blue blue-green peacock
Who gales open, waits, doubts and does not doubt.
There is a city above the city
That thinks of you as you think of it: sky,
That you are the sky to it, and these buildings,
Iridescent in thick night like flora
And fauna, are its clouds. We all are part
Of some other distant constellation,
A chanced-on font you see on a marquee
When you look out and then up,
When you think the thought that gets caught in air
And rises from your head like steam in the thaw—
That is the city above the city
Calling out to you through the blued spectrum,
That veiled feeling you keep to yourself of
The time you stood on a street and could swear
Some part, some magnificent part of you
Had just turned into a fish and opened
Up upwards into the darkness, the light,
The darkness, the light, the darkness, the light.