Blog: All We Want for Christmas

Anytime of the year in New York City is wonderful, but there’s something extra special about the Big Apple during the holidays. The season kicked off with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a tradition that started in 1924.

The big tree was lit at Rockefeller Center, and all of the store windows have been unveiled. After Thanksgiving feasts, bargain hunters scurried to the malls and shopping corridors for an early beginning to Black Friday, which has surreptitiously crept into the later hours of Turkey Thursday. Of course this year, Black Friday took on greater importance as we remain mired in a struggling, belt-tightening economy.

In 1939, when President Roosevelt was laboring to put Americans back to work during the Great Depression, he tried to energize the shopping season by moving Thanksgiving to the third Thursday of the month.

For me, the holiday season started even earlier than that this year. Walking toward my office on Fifth Avenue on November 8th, I noticed a long line in front of Barnes & Noble. Bill Clinton was inside signing his new book. With little time or inclination to wait in line, I bypassed the opportunity to shake hands with our 42nd president. Later, glancing out of my window, I saw that the line had disappeared.

Within minutes I was shaking hands with President Clinton as he autographed his book, “Back to Work.” Later that evening I attended the opening reception of an exhibition of Diego Rivera’s murals at the Museum of Modern Art. The works graphically illustrated the hardships of the Great Depression. What a juxtaposition – only in New York could you begin the day by meeting a former president and speak to him about the economic challenges facing our country in 2011 and later view paintings by a depression-era artist who depicted the ravages of poverty and unemployment that our country faced in 1931.

As I walked toward MoMA that evening, I passed the new Uniqlo store, which is across the street from the museum. They hired 1000 New Yorkers for their two new Manhattan stores, and created quite a stir in Manhattan in time for the holiday season. The following week, I attended the unveiling of Macy’s holiday windows, and the week after that, Saks Fifth Avenue’s sidewalk creations. Both Broadway and Fifth Avenue were occupied by swarms of happy and eager holiday shoppers.

Purveyors of everything from mass fashion to luxury iPad cases are structuring their short-term plans on the optimism of the season. And for the long term, as Wall Street continues to flinch over every economic indicator and any unsettling news reports from abroad, both large- and small-scale businesses are hoping to strengthen consumer confidence and put Americans “Back to Work.”