Christmas Shopping in New York

Ask anyone who has spent a December in New York City what the experience was like and you will almost certainly get the same answer: transformative. There is nowhere on Earth quite like New York at Christmas. The city that does everything at a scale and with an energy that other cities cannot match turns those qualities fully toward the holiday season, and the result is a spectacle of such concentrated beauty, warmth and commercial brilliance that it has no parallel in the world. The tree at Rockefeller Center rises seventy feet above the ice rink. The windows of the great department stores along Fifth Avenue become theatre that stops pedestrian traffic in its tracks. The Christmas markets fill the parks with colour and warmth. And the shopping is, by universal agreement, the finest anywhere on the planet. This is your guide to experiencing it properly.

1. The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree and Ice Rink

There is a moment in early December, usually on the first clear morning after the tree has been lit, when you turn off Fifth Avenue into the Rockefeller Plaza and see the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree for the first time, and no matter how many times you have seen it in photographs and films and television broadcasts, the actual, physical, three-dimensional reality of it stops you completely. It is, simply, enormous: typically between 69 and 100 feet tall, made from a Norway spruce donated from somewhere in the northeastern United States, decorated with more than five miles of LED lights and topped by a Swarovski crystal star that weighs approximately 900 pounds. The tradition dates to 1933, when workers building the complex decorated a small tree in the midst of the construction site, and it has grown, literally and figuratively, every year since.

The tree is lit in late November, at a ceremony broadcast live on national television that draws hundreds of thousands of spectators to the Plaza and millions more to their screens. From the moment of lighting until its removal in early January, it is the single most photographed object in New York City and one of the most photographed objects in the world. The crowd around it can be very dense in the peak period of mid-December to Christmas, and the best strategy for seeing it properly is to arrive early in the morning before the Plaza fills, or late in the evening after 10pm when the crowds thin and the tree glows against the dark sky with a quality of warmth and beauty that the midday photographs never quite capture.

Directly beneath the tree, in the sunken plaza of Rockefeller Center, the Rink at Rockefeller Center opens in October and operates through April. Ice skating beneath the Christmas tree is one of the quintessential New York holiday experiences, and one that rewards booking your session well in advance: tickets sell out weeks ahead during December and the skating slots are limited to 50 minutes. The rink is smaller than it appears in photographs, which creates an intimacy that the larger Central Park rinks do not have, and the view upward to the surrounding skyscrapers and the tree is one of those moments of urban theatre that makes New York feel genuinely incomparable.

2. The Department Store Windows: Saks, Bergdorf and the Art of the Christmas Display

The tradition of the decorated Christmas window display began in New York in the late nineteenth century, when the great department stores along Broadway and then Fifth Avenue discovered that an elaborately decorated window could draw pedestrians to a stop and convert their attention into sales. Over the following century the tradition evolved from simple decoration into something approaching public art: the windows of the great stores are now designed and executed by teams of professional window designers working for months in advance, with budgets that routinely reach hundreds of thousands of dollars per window, and the results are judged by New Yorkers and visitors alike as seriously as any gallery exhibition.

Saks Fifth Avenue, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 50th Street directly opposite Rockefeller Center, is the most celebrated of all the Christmas window destinations and deservedly so. The store's holiday window display has been a fixture of the New York Christmas season since the 1930s, and the current production is a major artistic undertaking involving animatronics, original narrative content and thousands of hand-crafted elements. But what draws the largest crowds is not the windows themselves but the light show that Saks projects onto the facade of the building: a spectacular animated display that synchronises light with music and transforms the entire exterior of one of the great Fifth Avenue buildings into a moving picture of astonishing technical sophistication. The show runs every ten minutes from mid-November to early January, and the crowd that gathers in front of the store for each performance is one of the most genuinely happy and genuinely communal sights that New York offers at any time of year.

Bergdorf Goodman, at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 58th Street, has what many window design professionals consider the most artistically ambitious Christmas windows in the city. Where Saks aims for spectacle and Macy's aims for sentiment, Bergdorf aims for something closer to high art: its windows are typically organised around a single theme or aesthetic concept and executed with a level of craft and imagination that has no parallel in retail display anywhere in the world. Past themes have included Alice in Wonderland, the Nutcracker, a journey through the history of flight, a tour of world mythologies and dozens of others, each interpreted with a depth and a visual intelligence that makes the windows genuinely worth studying at length. The store is open late on the evenings when the crowds are largest, and the security staff outside the windows are surprisingly tolerant of the extended scrutiny that the displays invite.

Lord and Taylor, Bloomingdale's and Tiffany and Co. all offer excellent window displays of varying character, and a self-guided walking tour of all the major windows, from the upper Fifties down to 34th Street and across to Lexington Avenue, makes one of the finest free activities that December New York offers. Allow two to three hours for a comprehensive tour and dress warmly: the best window-gazing happens at night, and December nights in New York are cold enough to make the wrong clothing a serious obstacle to enjoyment.

3. Fifth Avenue: The Greatest Shopping Street on Earth at Christmas

Fifth Avenue is not merely a shopping street at Christmas. It is a cultural institution, a rite of passage, a theatrical experience in which every pedestrian is simultaneously an actor and an audience member. The stretch between Grand Army Plaza at 59th Street and 34th Street is one of the most concentrated collections of luxury and middle-market retail in the world at any time of year, but in December it acquires an additional dimension of spectacle and energy that makes it one of the most extraordinary urban experiences available anywhere.

The luxury brands of the upper Fifties, Tiffany and Co., Cartier, Harry Winston, Gucci, Louis Vuitton and their neighbours, all compete to produce the most beautiful and most inventive seasonal window displays, and the result is a continuous gallery of commercial artistry that stretches for several blocks and justifies extended examination. Below 57th Street, the concentration of flagship stores increases: Nike, Apple, Abercrombie and Fitch and dozens of others occupy enormous multi-storey spaces that are transformed for the holiday season with decoration and atmospherics that cost more than many entire advertising campaigns.

The holiday lighting that the city installs along Fifth Avenue, tens of thousands of white lights strung between the buildings on wire structures that arch over the road, creates a tunnel of light that transforms the entire street into something that looks like the inside of a very large and very cheerful chandelier. Walking south from Central Park toward Midtown on a clear December evening, with the lights above and the illuminated windows on either side and the particular energy of a city in full holiday mode around you, is an experience that people who have had it once tend to describe as genuinely uplifting. It is one of those urban moments that make the expense and the effort of getting to New York for Christmas feel not merely justified but inevitable.

4. Bryant Park Winter Village: The Finest Christmas Market in New York

The Bryant Park Winter Village is the finest and largest outdoor Christmas market in New York City, and one of the finest Christmas markets in the United States. Set up in Bryant Park, the handsome public garden behind the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue, it typically opens in late October and runs through early January, making it one of the longest-running Christmas markets in North America. Entry to the park is completely free, and the experience of wandering through the 170-plus vendors on a cold December evening, with the surrounding skyscrapers illuminated above and the smell of mulled wine and roasted chestnuts in the air, is one of the most genuinely festive things that New York has to offer at any price.

The vendors at the Bryant Park Winter Village are predominantly independent makers, importers and small businesses rather than the chain retail that dominates the surrounding streets. You will find handmade jewellery from local designers, European Christmas ornaments imported directly from producers in Germany and the Czech Republic, artisan food products from across the United States, handcrafted leather goods, ceramic work, woodwork and dozens of other categories of original product that are simply unavailable in conventional retail. The food stalls are particularly strong: mulled wine (both German-style Glühwein and a New York hot toddy version), roasted chestnuts, Belgian waffles, Austrian pastries, artisan hot chocolate and a range of international street food make the market an excellent destination for lunch or an early dinner as well as for shopping.

The park also contains a free-to-use ice skating rink that is slightly larger than the Rockefeller Center rink and considerably less expensive: skate rental is a modest fee and there is no charge to skate, making it a popular destination for both locals and visitors who want the ice rink experience without the Rockefeller Center premium. The rink is open until 10pm on most evenings and later on weekends, and skating under the lights of the market with the midtown skyline above is an experience of considerable charm.

The Union Square Holiday Market, a short walk south on Sixth Avenue, is the second most significant Christmas market in Manhattan: a dense collection of approximately 150 vendors occupying the full length of Union Square Park from late November through Christmas Eve. The Union Square market has a slightly more downtown character than Bryant Park, with more emphasis on locally produced food, vintage goods and independent craft, and its position in the heart of a neighbourhood popular with younger New Yorkers gives it a social energy that the more tourist-oriented Bryant Park market lacks.

5. Macy's on 34th Street: The Temple of American Christmas

Macy's Herald Square, occupying the entire block of West 34th Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue, is the largest department store in the world by floor space and the undisputed temple of American commercial Christmas. The building covers over a million square feet across nine floors and a lower level, employs thousands of staff during the holiday season and receives a volume of visitors in December that makes even the busiest European department stores look quiet. It is, simultaneously, one of the most overwhelming and one of the most genuinely enjoyable shopping experiences in the city.

The store's Christmas credentials are impeccable. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, which has been running since 1924 and which transforms the route from the American Museum of Natural History down to Herald Square into a procession of enormous helium balloons, marching bands and celebrity performances watched by approximately 3.5 million spectators lining the streets and 50 million more on television, is the unofficial opening ceremony of the Christmas shopping season in New York and one of the great American public spectacles. The parade ends at Macy's itself, which feels appropriate: this is the store that has done more than any other institution to shape the particular character of American commercial Christmas.

Inside the store in December, the atmosphere is extraordinary: Christmas music, holiday decoration at every level, the smell of perfume and food and the particular warmth of a very large enclosed space full of very many people all engaged in the same seasonal purpose. The toy department on the upper floors is a pilgrimage destination for anyone travelling with children, an experience of toy-store grandeur that has no real parallel in contemporary retail. The Santaland experience, which has been a Macy's Christmas tradition since 1862, brings children to meet Santa Claus in an elaborate North Pole themed setting that occupies an entire floor of the store: booking is essential and sells out weeks in advance.

For adults shopping for themselves, the selection across fashion, beauty, home and accessories is among the most comprehensive in the city, and the price point covers a range from affordable everyday brands to designer labels that give Macy's a breadth that few individual stores anywhere can match. The restaurant on the top floor provides a necessary refuge from the holiday shopping intensity, and the views over Herald Square from the upper floors are an unexpected bonus.

6. Beyond Fifth Avenue: SoHo, the West Village and the Neighbourhood Markets

The greatest mistake a Christmas shopper can make in New York is to confine themselves to the Midtown retail corridor and miss the extraordinary variety of shopping available in the city's downtown and outer neighbourhoods. The concentrated glamour of Fifth Avenue and the scale of Macy's are genuinely impressive, but the most interesting and the most distinctive Christmas shopping in New York is found further afield, in the neighbourhoods where the local character of the city expresses itself most clearly and where the shops are more likely to offer something genuinely impossible to find elsewhere.

SoHo, the district of cast-iron warehouses south of Houston Street that became New York's most fashionable shopping neighbourhood in the 1980s and 1990s, remains one of the finest retail destinations in the city during the Christmas season. The combination of flagship stores for international luxury brands (Prada, Chanel, Louis Vuitton and dozens of others occupy spectacular SoHo spaces), excellent independent boutiques and the lively street scene of Broadway and Prince Street makes SoHo a half-day destination in its own right. The neighbourhood's galleries are also worth visiting in December: the combination of art-world activity and holiday shopping gives SoHo a particular December energy that is quite different from Midtown's commercial intensity.

The West Village, the neighbourhood of narrow streets and Federal-period townhouses west of Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village, is the most atmospheric neighbourhood in Manhattan at Christmas and the finest destination for the kind of quiet, individual, serendipitous shopping that the crowds of Midtown make impossible. The small independent boutiques along Bleecker Street, Christopher Street and the side streets of the neighbourhood offer handmade goods, vintage jewellery, artisan food products, books from independent booksellers and dozens of other categories of original merchandise. The neighbourhood is beautiful to walk in December, its brownstone facades hung with wreaths and its small storefronts lit from within in a way that makes every block look like a Christmas card. And the West Village dining scene, which is excellent at any time of year, is at its most atmospheric in December when the restaurants and wine bars are full and the cold outside makes the warmth within feel genuinely inviting.

Grand Central Terminal, beyond its function as the city's most beautiful train station, houses the Grand Central Holiday Fair in its Vanderbilt Hall from late November through Christmas Eve: approximately 40 vendors selling artisan goods, gifts and food in one of the most spectacular architectural settings available to any market in the world. The combination of the beaux-arts grandeur of the terminal and the intimacy of the market stalls creates an experience unlike any conventional retail environment, and the market is considerably less crowded than the outdoor markets in the parks.

New York at Christmas is not merely a shopping destination. It is a performance: the city at its most theatrical, most generous and most fully itself. The tree, the windows, the markets, the cold air and the extraordinary density of human energy all conspire to create something that the photographs never quite capture and that anyone who has experienced it in person tends to describe, when pressed, in the same way: as the best Christmas they have ever had.

Getting to New York for Christmas: Arriving the Right Way

New York is served by three major airports, of which JFK International Airport (JFK) handles the majority of international long-haul traffic and is the preferred arrival point for most transatlantic visitors. The most comfortable and direct way to reach your hotel in Midtown Manhattan from JFK is a private airport transfer, which takes approximately 45 to 60 minutes depending on traffic and deposits you at your hotel with no luggage management on public transport. This is particularly valuable during the holiday season when you are likely to be carrying bags that the subway and AirTrain do not accommodate comfortably.

Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR), in New Jersey, is an excellent alternative with a slightly shorter drive to many Midtown hotels and excellent connections on NJ Transit trains to Penn Station in approximately 25 minutes. LaGuardia Airport (LGA), the closest airport to Midtown, handles predominantly domestic traffic and is a good option for visitors arriving from other American cities.

Hotel availability in December is significant: book as early as possible, particularly if you are planning to visit during the week before Christmas, when rooms in Midtown fill completely and prices reach their annual peak. The Theatre District, the Upper West Side and the Flatiron District are all excellent bases for Christmas shopping, with good subway access to all the major shopping destinations and a range of accommodation options at different price points.