纽约的圣诞节

tycoon

Iam not a Christmas person — I fear the pageantry2) and the crowds. Yet when I moved to New York in the wet days of last spring, I knew it was waiting for me at the end of the year, like an unwelcome chore. I moved into my Manhattan apartment with a distant curiosity, expectation, and fear, about what it would actually be like.
　　Then, early one morning, just when I think Christmas will never actually arrive, I jog past a tree lying ignominiously3) in Madison Square Park.In Washington Square, a prouder tree already stands tall beneath the arch, and the russet4) sunrise above the East River holds out the promise of the coming holiday season.
　　A few days later I walk up Fifth Avenue5) to witness the sights of New York Christmas. My friends tell me to visit the department store windows but at Macy’s6) I can’t get near enough to see. A heavy crowd watches dancers rehearse to lways Look on the Bright Side of Life?for the Thanksgiving Parade. Inside, inflatable Snoopies loom overhead and shoppers trapped in the lifts lean back, expiring, looking like they are in some kind of hell.
　　traditional,?said a woman beside me in a warm coat.like tradition,?said her friend. They were from Maine. They had come to New York for shopping and eating, and spoke admiringly of the white crystals in Bloomingdale’s7) and the lighting of the Lincoln Center8) tree the evening before.
　　At Bloomingdale’s on Lexington Avenue, the theme is elebrating the World? The windows are filled with revolving Santas.
　　In Bloomingdale’s windows, after the depiction of the exotica9) of Russia’s Grandfather Frost and the Dutch Feast of Sinterklaas, there seems to be some relief, in the American window, at the simplicity of olly old Santa Claus and our beloved Rudolph?
　　New Yorkers, probably more than anyone else, lay claim to the invention of today’s modern Christmas. Until the 19th century, the holiday season was still influenced by its Dutch colonial and puritan past, according to author Daniel Pool in Christmas in New York.
　　New York never seems to have looked back in its festive reacliness10)? In December, the only manuscript of Dickens?A Christmas Carol is brought out for the public in the Morgan Library at 225 Madison Avenue.
　　While Thanksgiving is the private American family holiday, Christmas — at least in New York — is a public affair. Some might say it is kitsch11). In fact it is beautiful. Commercialism is everywhere and yet the corporate rivalry creates ingenuity, wonder, style.
　　After this I climb back to the peak of Fifth Avenue, at the crossroads with 57th Street. I look south towards the Empire State Building12), in its traditional red and green mantle of Christmas lights right up to its antenna13). The sky is white with cold. Down the canyons, misty towers tumble over each other into the distance.
　　Christmas is here in New York and I like it.