Rebecca Engel
New York at Christmas is the version of the city everyone already has in their head. The tree at Rockefeller Center, the windows on Fifth Avenue, steam coming up through the street grates while somebody sells roasted nuts on the corner. The strange part is that it all genuinely happens, more or less exactly the way the movies show it.
The problem is volume. There are more things to do in New York City at Christmas than anyone can fit into one trip, and half of them sell out weeks ahead. This list runs from the ones nobody skips down to the deeper cuts, so you can build a few days around the big ones and pick up the rest as you go.
1. See The Tree At Rockefeller Center
It’s the tree everyone pictures. A Norway spruce somewhere between 75 and 90 feet tall, wrapped in about 50,000 lights, with a Swarovski star on top that weighs close to 900 pounds.
The lighting happens the Wednesday after Thanksgiving and it’s televised, which means the plaza that night is a crush of people who mostly can’t see anything. The tree then stays up until early January, so there’s no reason to fight that particular crowd.
It’s lit from early morning until midnight every day, and the best time to stand in front of it is before about eight in the morning. You get the tree, the flags, the skaters below, and maybe thirty other people instead of thirty thousand.
The plaza runs between 48th and 51st Streets just off Fifth Avenue, and it’s free to walk through at any hour.
2. Get Tickets To The Radio City Christmas Spectacular
The Rockettes have been doing this show since 1933 and it hasn’t lost a step. Ninety minutes, dozens of dancers kicking in a line that stays impossibly level, and a wooden soldier routine that ends with the whole row toppling like dominoes.
The Living Nativity at the end brings real camels onto the stage at Radio City Music Hall, which is either the most charming thing you’ll see all December or the strangest, depending on your mood.
Shows run several times a day from early November into early January. Cheaper seats up in the third mezzanine are honestly fine here, because the whole thing is built around scale and formation rather than facial expressions.
Book well ahead. This is one of the few things on this list where turning up and hoping simply doesn’t work.
3. Walk The Holiday Windows From Bergdorf To Saks
The department store windows are the best free thing in the city in December, and they’re all within a walk of each other. Bergdorf Goodman at 58th Street does the most extravagant ones, tiny worlds built by hand over most of a year.
From there it’s south down Fifth Avenue to Saks at 49th, with Tiffany and a few others on the way. Bloomingdale’s sits a few blocks east at 59th and Lexington, and Macy’s has its own set down at Herald Square.
Do the walk after nine at night. The daytime crowd on Fifth in December moves at about one block every ten minutes, and after dark the sidewalks open up and the windows look better anyway.
The whole route takes an hour at a slow pace and costs nothing, which makes it the easiest thing on this list to fit around something else.
4. Watch The Light Show On The Saks Fifth Avenue Facade
The entire front of the Saks flagship becomes a light show set to music, running every ten minutes or so from dusk until late.
It’s ten stories of the building lighting up in sequence, and it’s genuinely loud and bright in a way that photos don’t quite carry. People stop dead in the middle of the sidewalk for it, which tells you something.
Stand across Fifth Avenue rather than directly underneath, ideally on the corner near Rockefeller Plaza. You get the whole facade in frame and the tree is fifty steps behind you.
Pair it with the windows walk and you’ve done the two biggest free things in midtown in one evening.
5. Shop The Winter Village At Bryant Park
Bryant Park fills up with around 170 glass kiosks selling food, ornaments, jewelry and hot drinks, with the library on one side and midtown towers on all the others.
The rink in the middle is the only free ice in the city if you bring your own skates. Rentals cost money, but the ice itself doesn’t, which is a rare thing in this part of Manhattan.
The food side is better than most market food. There’s a lodge with proper seating and heaters, which matters more than it sounds like it does at seven in the evening in December.
The shops run from late October to early January and the rink stays open into March, so this is one of the few things here that survives past the holidays.
6. Drive Through The Dyker Heights Christmas Lights
About an hour from midtown in southwest Brooklyn, a few dozen families spend the entire fall decorating their houses, and the result has to be seen to be believed. Twenty foot nutcrackers, full nativity scenes, animatronic everything, whole roofs of moving figures.
It started with one neighbor in the 1980s and turned into an arms race. Some of the displays now get installed by professional companies and cost more than a used car.
The heart of it is 11th through 13th Avenues between 83rd and 86th Streets. Take the D train to 18th Avenue and walk about fifteen minutes, or join one of the bus tours if you’d rather not deal with it in the cold.
Go on a weeknight between five and nine. Weekend evenings turn the streets into a slow parade of cars and it’s much better on foot anyway.
7. See The Nutcracker At Lincoln Center
New York City Ballet has been dancing George Balanchine’s version at the David H. Koch Theater since 1954, and it’s the one every other Nutcracker in the country is measured against.
About ninety children from the School of American Ballet appear in it, and the Christmas tree on stage grows to forty feet in front of you, which reliably gets an audible reaction from the room.
It runs from late November through early January with matinees most days. Those afternoon shows are the ones to book if kids are coming, since the whole thing runs about two hours with an intermission.
Tickets go fast for the weekends before Christmas. Midweek in early December is easier to get and costs less.
8. Find The Holiday Train Show At The New York Botanical Garden
Model trains run through nearly 200 New York landmarks, all of them built from bark, twigs, acorns and seed pods. The Brooklyn Bridge, the old Penn Station, Yankee Stadium, brownstones, the Statue of Liberty, all of it made out of plant material by hand.
It’s inside the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory up in the Bronx, so it’s warm, which makes it the best bad weather option on this list.
Tickets are timed and the weekend slots go first. Weekday mornings are calm and you can actually stand in front of each piece long enough to work out what it’s made of.
The garden also lights up on select evenings during the season, so it’s worth checking whether your date lines up with one of those.
9. Book A Table At Rolf’s German Restaurant
Rolf’s on Third Avenue in Gramercy is decorated to a degree that stops being decoration and becomes an environment. Fifteen thousand ornaments, hundreds of thousands of lights, ceilings you can’t see through, five artists working for months to install the whole thing.
The food is German and perfectly good, schnitzel and sauerbraten and beer in heavy glasses, but nobody comes for the food. People come to sit inside a snow globe.
Holiday reservations open after Labor Day and are taken by phone only, which is exactly as old fashioned as it sounds. The bar doesn’t take reservations at all, so that’s the way in if you didn’t plan three months ahead.
Go on the early side. By eight on a December evening the bar is three deep and nobody is moving.
10. Skate Under The Tree At The Rink At Rockefeller Center
The rink at Rockefeller Center is tiny, expensive, and completely worth doing once. It sits below street level with the tree above it and the gold Prometheus statue at one end, and there’s nowhere else that looks like it.
Sessions are timed and sell out, especially in the evenings. The first slots of the morning are the cheapest and the least crowded, and the light down there early is better than at night.
Skating time works out at roughly an hour and a half once you’re on the ice, which is plenty on a surface that size.
If the price makes you wince, skip it and skate at number eighteen on this list instead. The view is different but the ice is four times bigger.
11. Look For The Origami Holiday Tree At The Museum Of Natural History
A thirteen foot tree covered in hundreds of hand folded paper models, all of them themed to the museum itself. Dinosaurs, the blue whale, beetles, birds, the occasional dwarf mammoth.
Volunteers fold the whole collection over the course of the year and the theme changes with whatever the museum is featuring, so it’s genuinely different each time.
It stands in the Grand Gallery near the great canoe, and it’s included with museum admission rather than being a separate ticket.
This is a good one to pair with a cold afternoon, since you’re already inside a museum that takes hours to get through.
12. Catch The Light Show Inside Grand Central Terminal
The main concourse ceiling becomes a light show in the evenings, running for a few minutes at a time on the half hour with an ambient version in between. Standing in the middle of the floor while the whole room changes color is a strange and very good experience.
Vanderbilt Hall holds the Holiday Fair at the same time, around forty vendors under the chandeliers, and it’s one of the better markets in the city for actual gifts rather than novelty items.
The Transit Museum runs a free model train show in the passage near the Station Master’s office, and that one stays up well into February after everything else has come down.
All three are free, they’re in the same building, and you’re in a train station, so it costs nothing to swing through on the way to something else.
13. Ride The Holiday Nostalgia Train On A Sunday In December
The Transit Museum runs eight subway cars from the 1930s in regular passenger service on Sundays in December. Rattan seats, paddle ceiling fans, bare bulbs, roll signs and period advertising, all of it original.
It costs a normal subway fare. That’s the whole price, which makes it the best value of anything in this article.
Riders dress up for it. Expect a car full of people in 1940s coats and hats taking photos of each other, and expect to be the only person on the platform who didn’t know it was coming.
The route and the departure times change year to year, so check the Transit Museum’s page for the current schedule before you plan a Sunday around it.
14. Shop The Union Square Holiday Market
Around 150 red and white booths fill the south end of Union Square, and the balance of vendors here leans further toward small New York makers than the midtown markets do.
It’s the best of the markets for buying something you’d actually keep. Ceramics, prints, hot sauce, wool, that sort of thing, along with a solid row of food stalls.
It runs from mid November until Christmas Eve and then closes for the year, so this is the one that disappears first.
Weekday mornings are calm. After work on a December weekday it’s shoulder to shoulder, and the whole thing becomes hard to browse.
15. See The Angel Tree At The Metropolitan Museum Of Art
A twenty foot blue spruce stands in the Medieval Sculpture Hall covered in 18th century Neapolitan angels, with a Baroque nativity scene spread across the base and a stone choir screen behind it.
The figures are the real thing, collected by one woman over decades and given to the museum in the 1950s. The tradition has run every year since.
There are short lighting moments through the day where the hall dims and the tree comes up with recorded music, and the room is worth timing your visit around.
It’s included with admission, and New York State residents can still pay what they wish at the door.
16. Hear A Christmas Concert At St. Patrick’s Cathedral
St. Patrick’s sits on Fifth Avenue directly across from Rockefeller Center, which means most people walk past it on the way to the tree without going in.
It’s free to walk through, it’s warm, and in December there’s usually a choir rehearsing or a concert scheduled. The acoustics under that ceiling do most of the work.
The crèche goes up near the front and the whole nave gets decorated, and after the noise of Fifth Avenue the quiet inside is its own kind of relief.
Midnight mass on Christmas Eve fills hours ahead of time and requires planning. A weekday afternoon in the middle of December requires none at all.
17. Look Down On The Tree From Top Of The Rock
The observation decks at 30 Rockefeller Plaza put you directly above the tree and the rink, with the Empire State Building lined up in one direction and Central Park in the other.
It’s the better of the midtown views for this specific season, because you’re looking at the thing everyone came to see rather than standing in the middle of it.
Tickets are timed and sunset slots cost the most and sell out first. An hour after dark is cheaper, and the city looks better lit anyway.
Dress for it. The top deck is open to the air and the wind up there in December is a different animal from the wind at street level.
18. Skate At Wollman Rink Without The Rockefeller Prices
Wollman sits at the southern end of Central Park with the skyline rising over the trees behind it, and it’s about four times the size of the rink at Rockefeller Center.
It costs meaningfully less, sessions are longer, and you’re not skating in a rectangle with two hundred people watching you from the railing above.
Weekday mornings are close to empty. Weekend afternoons are the opposite, and the rental line alone can eat half an hour.
It opens in late October and runs into early spring, so it’s another one that isn’t tied to the holidays.
19. Walk The Lightscape Trail At Brooklyn Botanic Garden
A mile of illuminated trail through the garden after dark, with tunnels of light, fire installations and trees lit from underneath. It takes about ninety minutes at a normal pace.
It sold out entirely last season, so tickets are a book ahead situation rather than a decide on the day one.
There are adults only evenings and quieter sensory friendly entry times, which is worth knowing if either of those suits your group better.
Dress much warmer than you think. It’s an hour and a half of standing around outdoors in Brooklyn in December and there’s very little shelter on the route.
20. Take The Kids To Santaland At Macy’s Herald Square
The eighth floor of Macy’s turns into a full village, and around 170,000 people go through it every season to meet Santa at the end.
It’s free, which is genuinely unusual for anything of this scale in Manhattan, but reservations are the difference between walking in and standing in a line that wraps the floor.
The set itself is worth the walk even without a child in tow. It’s a proper piece of stagecraft that has been running for decades.
This is also the Santaland that David Sedaris wrote about after working here as an elf, which is either a reason to go or a reason to keep expectations calibrated.
21. Warm Up With Hot Chocolate At Jacques Torres
This is the thick European style, closer to melted chocolate than to a milky drink, and it’s the correct thing to be holding on Fifth Avenue in December.
The wicked version has chipotle and cinnamon in it and it sneaks up on you about four sips in.
There are shops across the city, so there’s usually one near wherever you already are. The one in DUMBO pairs with the bridge views if you’re over in Brooklyn anyway.
Small cup rather than large. It’s much richer than it looks and a big one defeats most people.
22. See The Holiday Lights At The Bronx Zoo
The zoo lights up after dark with trails of lights and hundreds of animal shaped lanterns, plus ice carving demonstrations and a train that runs through the middle of it.
Tickets are reserved in advance and the whole thing is outdoors, so this is a boots and layers evening rather than a coat over a nice outfit evening.
It pairs neatly with the Botanical Garden train show at number eight, since both are in the Bronx and one is indoors and warm while the other isn’t.
Early evening slots on weeknights are the quietest. Weekend nights close to Christmas are the busiest of the season.
23. Sing At The Messiah Sing-In At David Geffen Hall
The National Chorale has run this one night a year at Lincoln Center since 1967, and the point of it is that the audience is the choir.
More than 2,000 people sing Handel’s Messiah together, conducted from the stage, with professional soloists filling in the parts you’d struggle with.
You can buy a score at the door if you don’t own one, and nobody is auditioning anybody. Plenty of people in the hall are reading the music for the first time.
It happens on a single evening in December, so check the date early. Once it’s gone it’s gone until next year.
24. Eat Christmas Dinner In Chinatown
On December 25th most of the city closes, and Chinatown stays open. It’s been the fallback Christmas dinner in New York for generations and it long ago stopped being a fallback.
Dim sum in the middle of the day, Peking duck in the evening, and dining rooms full of people who all had the same idea.
Most places don’t take reservations, so the move is to turn up early or accept a wait. Flushing in Queens is the other option if Manhattan’s Chinatown is full.
It’s one of the few things you can do on Christmas Day itself, which is worth knowing before you plan that day around anything else.
25. Walk Central Park After The First Snow
Snow isn’t guaranteed in December, but when it lands the park empties out for about an hour and then fills with people sledding, and both of those hours are worth being there for.
Gapstow Bridge at the southeast corner is the postcard, with the skyline behind the pond. Bow Bridge and Bethesda Terrace are the other two everybody photographs.
Cedar Hill and Pilgrim Hill are where the sledding happens, and there’s a long tradition of people using whatever they can find, including trash can lids and takeout trays.
The horse carriages line up along 59th Street at the south end if that’s your kind of thing, and the park is at its best in the first light after a storm.
More Christmas Things To Do In New York City
A few worth knowing about that didn’t make the numbered list. The Columbus Circle holiday market is smaller than Bryant Park and Union Square but it sits right at the corner of the park, so it’s an easy add on to a Central Park afternoon.
Brookfield Place downtown hangs a light and sound show in the Winter Garden under the palm trees, which is a genuinely odd combination and free to walk into. The Empire State Building runs holiday light sequences on the tower most evenings.
The world’s largest menorah goes up at Grand Army Plaza by the Plaza Hotel during Hanukkah, and the lighting nights there draw a real crowd.
None of these need much planning, which is exactly what you want on the third day of a trip when the schedule has fallen apart. There are more things to do in New York City at Christmas than any list can hold, and half the good ones turn up by accident.
When To Go To Avoid The Worst Of The Crowds
Decorations start going up before Thanksgiving and most of them stay until the first week of January, which gives you a six week window rather than the two weeks people assume.
The single busiest stretch is the week between Christmas and New Year, when the whole country seems to be standing on Fifth Avenue at once. The weekends in mid December are a close second.
Early December on a weekday is the sweet spot. Everything is up, the lines are manageable, and the ticketed things still have availability.
The first week of January is the quiet secret. The tree is still there, the rinks are still open, the crowds have gone home and hotel prices drop off a cliff.
What To Wear In New York City In December
Expect the thirties and forties, and expect it to feel colder than that between the buildings. The wind on the avenues is the part that catches people out.
Waterproof boots with actual grip matter more than anything else in the bag. Slush at the curb cuts is ankle deep for days after a snowfall and every crossing has one.
Layers you can shed, because indoor heat in New York is set somewhere near tropical. You’ll be peeling things off in every restaurant and museum.
You’ll walk five miles a day without trying, so whatever goes on your feet is the decision that matters. Save the nice shoes for the show and carry them.
Final Thoughts
New York in December rewards a loose plan. Book the two or three things that sell out, then leave the rest of each day open and let the walking between them be the trip.
If it’s a first visit, the shape that works is the windows and the tree on one evening, a market and a rink on another, and one big ticketed thing like the ballet or Radio City in the middle.
The rest of it is free and it’s everywhere. Half the best moments happen on the way to something else, which is the whole argument for not overfilling the calendar.
