Famous Ankles

It’s Christmas Eve and I’ve spent the day doing my NYC tradition:  wandering around wishing people Merry Christmas!  And I did wander.

I started by going up to Harlem.  It’s been way too long and I wanted to see how Harlem’s streets are set for Christmas.  I went this morning and found that Harlem’s streets are mostly deserted at 10am on a Christmas Eve.  I’ll be posting pictures over the next few days, but it was pretty devoid of Christmas decorations.  I didn’t do any of the backstreets where a lot of the small Churches are, so there may have been more.  The most I saw was a Christmas tree outside of the Adam Clayton Powell building.  On the other hand, the stores did have a lot of Christmas stuff.  I wished a couple of people a Merry Christmas, but I was delighted when someone wished it of me first.  That seldom happens and is very welcome.

After a little over an hour, I left Harlem and went to Greenwich Village.  The Village had a bit more in terms of public decoration.  I wandered on West 10th Street and saw an interesting sight:  a lot of the townhouses have put out evergreen decorations.  A lot of them also had lights, but it was too early to have them on.  Nevertheless, the evergreen branches were a nice touch.  I did wish a number of people a Merry Christmas and had roughly half of them respond in kind.  I then went over to Union Square and looked for Schleiermacher.  The guy running the Unemployed Philosophers Guild confessed they didn’t have his fridge magnet.  Woe is me.  I looked, just in case, but they actually seemed to be light on the philosopher fridge magnets.  They had a lot of historical figures and writers, though.

This evening, I wandered around my part of town and wished the random passers-by a Merry Christmas.  Once again, about half responded.

And now I’m at home.  I’ll go out in the morning/afternoon and do the same sort of thing.  It’s nice to do and it gets me out of my place; and I really enjoy it when somebody beats me to it.

I hope to get a chance to post some of today’s photos and some pics from the weekend when I wandered in Times Square and Gramercy Park.

-H

This entry was posted on December 24, 2007 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Harlem, Manhattan, Mid-town, Union Square, Wanderings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.