We had the best time in the city and got to do all kinds of wonderful things. It was such a fun way to spend the holiday that was different and definitely memorable. I was actually kinda surprised at how many other families had traveled to the city to spend their Christmas holiday in a hotel room, but evidently people do it, because all the tourist spots were packed.
Our first stop was the M&M World in Times Square! It was amazing and I'd never seen so many M&M's and M&M merchandise. You could buy coffee mugs, t-shirts, puzzles, board games, Christmas ornaments, notepads...anything you can possibly imagine to buy, they had it with one of the M&M characters on it.
They had every type of M&M possible in every color imaginable. I must be like 8 years old, because I thought all the colors were so beautiful!
Moving on...we headed toward Rockefellar Center and 5th Avenue! We stopped inside St. Patricks Cathedral where mass was about to begin. We didn't stay for mass, but walked through the beautiful church and warmed up. Justin had to take off his hat out of respect, however, I don't know how much more respectful this look was.
We strolled down to Cartier...where we went inside and gawked at diamonds. Not even one sales person approached us, so I guess it must have been obvious that we weren't serious shoppers. Here's a picture of my parents acting out those jewelry commercials where the girl is so excited to receive jewelry for Christmas...hilarious!
We kept walking, and ended up down by Central Park and the Plaza hotel. We tried to pet a horse in Central park, which didn't really work, and then we tried to walk into the Plaza hotel, which also didn't work...evidently all you can do is walk into the front foyer room and then walk back outside. Not the Home Alone 2 experience we were looking for. We did have some fun at FAO Schwarz! We saw the big piano and played with a stuffed giraffe that costs over $900!! Here's Justin and Ryan in the Lego's section. Notice that Justin's hair is still standing tall!
On Christmas Eve, we had the opportunity to see the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall! Oh my goodness, it was so amazing! The Rockettes were phenoemenal, and part of the show is in 3D now...so we wore the glasses and everything.
Hands down...best part of the production is the live nativity at the end.
Christmas photo of the kids!!
So the big joke of the trip is that I really wanted to see the window displays at Saks 5th Avenue, but we kept forgetting to do it when we were in the area. So after literally walking down 5th Avenue two other times on Christmas Eve day, we went back out so that we could see the windows at night. Nobody was as impressed as me. But I thought they were stunning!
We stayed at a great hotel that was right in the middle of Times Square. It was great and one of the best parts about the hotel...they serve warm chocolate chip cookies at check-in...and when you're leaving to go out in the morning...and when you get back to the hotel after dinner...and if you're hungry up in your room, you can walk down to the lobby and they'll give you another one. We joked that if they had charged us for each cookie we ate, we'd be in a lot of trouble.
Here we are having Christmas Dinner at Ruth's Chris. Again...I was amazed at how many people were out. The restaurant wasn't taking anyone who didn't have a reservation because they were already so full. I couldn't believe how busy everything was...I thought Christmas day would have been slow, but no, it was the same busy city. Can you tell how excited we were for our steaks??
After dinner, we had tickets to see Wicked...we were all so excited. My mom started telling these people on the street that we were seeing Wicked (we're so obviously tourists) and they were actually going to see it too. So we all had this great idea to take a picture in front of the Wicked sign on the street. However, the pic looks more like we're posing in front of the Parking sign. Regardless, we all loved the show. It was fantastic!
After Wicked, we went back to our hotel and found out that the flight that my family was taking home was cancelled already because of the blizzard that was coming. They ended up re-routing their travel plans, which meant our plan to go to the Brooklyn Tabernacle for church on Sunday was nixed from the itenerary. It was probably the only day in history that it was a better option to fly out of Syracuse than out of New York City.
We had a great time and will remember this Christmas for a long time. We are so grateful to my parents and brother for traveling up to New York for Christmas so we could spend it together.
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