There is no Christmas in New York. There are Christmases. How, after all, could it be possible to contain within a word the vastly different variations that the city mounts each year?
From the quiet pleasures of a working-class family opening presents in the Bronx to a father and son in matching bow ties taking holy communion on the Upper East Side, Christmas is a mirror and a lodestar for the city, reflecting its diversity and affirming its separate parts.
There are tourists looking at the Rockefeller Center tree and Jews looking for a decent Chinese meal. And there is a homeless man looking for something as simple — and as difficult to find — as a gift.
Here are a few scenes from these Christmases, a day that, at least in New York, makes sense only in the plural.
Starting Fresh in a New Home
The two girls opened their presents in a pajama-clad frenzy. Jade, 10, wrapped her arms around Winnie the Pooh. Veronica, 7, carefully arranged her new Bratz dolls inside a silver toy convertible.
The girls’ parents, Javier and Victoria Perez, had gifts waiting for them under the tree as well, but they were in no rush. They had, in a sense, opened their Christmas gift on Dec. 13, when they opened the door of their new apartment and moved in.
“That’s worth more than a million bucks to me,” said Mr. Perez, 44.
This was Christmas in the South Bronx, in the poorest Congressional district in the country, where happiness can be as simple as an affordable rent.
For about 10 years, the Perez family lived in a one-bedroom apartment near Yankee Stadium. The girls slept in bunk beds at one end of the bedroom, the parents in a bed at the other end. The kitchen had one cabinet.
In 2002, Mr. Perez was laid off from his office job at the Chase Manhattan Bank.
He enrolled at City College and landed a part-time job in the admissions office there. Mrs. Perez worked in customer service at a Macy’s facility in New Jersey. They needed to go on welfare to make ends meet.
Lately, though, things seem to have taken a turn for the better: The Perezes qualified for a two-bedroom apartment in a new housing complex for low-income residents on East 163rd Street, at the edge of Morrisania, with rent of $720 a month.
Mr. Perez expects to graduate in the spring with a bachelor’s degree in Latin American studies, and had an interview recently for a full-time job in city government. “Everything is coming into place,” he said.
On Christmas morning in Apartment 2G, Mr. Perez sat on the sofa watching Latin singers on television. Mrs. Perez, 39, was in the kitchen, scrambling eggs with one eye on the oven, where she was roasting pernil, pork shoulder.
Jade and Veronica sat on the hardwood floor, ripping, pulling and cutting at gifts, many of them provided by an after-school program run by the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, a Bronx nonprofit.
It was hard to tell who was more excited: the girls, or their father. Mr. Perez loves Christmas. Last year, he dressed up as Santa Claus for the after-school program’s holiday party. Two days after they moved into the new apartment, he bought a Christmas tree — a real one, not a fake one like they had at their other place.
MANNY FERNANDEZ
Taking Pride in Family Traditions
Father and son stood near the corner of Fifth Avenue and 90th Street, chatting about nothing in particular as hundreds of people filed into the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest — some regulars, many not.
The Hugheses are regulars. They have come to this Christmas Eve service for as long as 22-year-old Andrew Hughes has been alive.
The matriarchs of the family had already secured a 10th-row pew. They make it a habit to arrive well before the Festival Holy Eucharist begins at 11 p.m.
There is an unmistakable air of regality in the austere church, where the operatic voices bounce off the vaulted ceilings. “It’s a tradition, this is the family tradition,” said Andrew’s father, Jefferson Hughes, 57. “We have a lot of them this time of year.”
For example, Mr. Hughes long ago taught Andrew how to tie a bow tie, and each man wore his proudly, the father’s red, his son’s, green. They feast on leg of lamb every year.
As Andrew has grown up, of course, traditions adjust. Last year he was working in Colorado and did not return home to New York for the first time; nevertheless, he assured his parents, he did attend the Eve of the Nativity service at an Episcopal church there.
This year, in another first, Andrew baked the pair of pecan pies for the requisite holiday dessert.
“It’s part of my moving home and helping out,” he said earnestly. “Yes, I have to be a good son.”
Andrew is deciding whether to remain in New York or to take a job in Jackson Hole, Wyo.
His father said he had given Andrew plenty of “balanced advice” about how to make his decision, as well as, for Christmas, some skis, noting, “We tend to be practical in our gifts.”
Andrew looked up at the snowless sky, mentioned the balmy weather and observed: “I guess skis would be more practical in Wyoming.”
JENNIFER MEDINA
Homeless, but Eager to Give
Wadud Rashid Mohammed searched for Christmas gifts yesterday in the one place he could afford them: a garbage can on the corner of 110th and Broadway. It was 6:45 a.m. The sun was down, the pickings were slim.
Mr. Mohammed cut a fragile figure in the darkness: a tall, thin man going through the trash. He discarded a pizza box on the sidewalk. He stopped to consider the pages of a soggy magazine. A box of Christmas lights caught his eye, but it was empty. Same with the 40-ounce bottle of domestic beer.
He sighed, stood up, scratched his head beneath a soiled wool cap. “Being that it’s Christmas, there’s not too much to work with here.”
It has become a holiday tradition over the last 10 years, Mr. Mohammed said, canvassing the trash bins of the Upper West Side for presents for his children. His boy is 10, his girl, 14. Both live with their mothers.
That’s what happens, he explained, when you have no job, no home.
Mr. Mohammed is 40 now and would like New York to know a few things. First of all, he has not always been homeless. Also: he used to have a job.
He shined shoes, which he was proud to do, he said, because a man can make a living shining shoes. But what he dreamed of all along was architecture, “building buildings way up into the sky.”
Then, when he was 21, Mr. Mohammed said, he crossed a street in Hoboken, N.J., and a sports car ran him down. It was a Porsche, he said; even now the word comes out like spit.
There were lawsuits. He signed some papers that he did not understand.
In his leg, the tibia and fibula were broken, and have been replaced with steel.
“I never got nothin’ for Christmas, nothin’,” Mr. Mohammed said, “even when I was small. You imagine that? Fourteen years old and you get nothin’ for Christmas?”
As the sun came up on the street corner, Mr. Mohammed found a tennis shoe and slipped it into his bag.
ALAN FEUER
Speaking Chinese, Dining Kosher
Kent Zhang knew that few, if any, of his customers at Buddha Bodai, his vegetarian — and kosher — restaurant in Chinatown were there to celebrate the birth of Jesus, but he greeted each with a hearty “Merry Christmas!” nonetheless. “Merry Christmas, Mr. Harry!” he shouted cheerfully to an Orthodox Jew in a black hat and beard.
Harry, it turns out, was Zvi Bar-Lavan. He did not seem to mind being called Harry or being wished a Merry Christmas.
“Oh wait, you don’t celebrate that!” Mr. Zhang said in mock surprise.
“It’s O.K.,” Mr. Bar-Lavan replied, smiling. “He was one of us.”
And such was the observance of Judaism’s unwritten Eleventh Commandment: Thou shall eat Chinese food and see a movie on Christmas.
Mr. Zhang is delighted to accommodate the custom. On Monday, his small shop at the corner of Mott and Worth Streets began filling up at noon; by 2 p.m., more than 180 meals had been served.
“Usually there’s a break in the middle, but it don’t look like it will be that way today,” Mr. Zhang said between ringing up orders of shark fin soup and roasted pork — made with bean curd. “This place is good for everyone. Kosher just means clean, and everyone wants clean food.”
At one table, more than a dozen practitioners of the martial art Chi Cong exchanged conversation in rapid fire Cantonese. At another, a small group of Israelis chatted loudly in Hebrew.
The restaurant’s clientele is evenly divided, he said, between Jews and Chinese people. And yes: there are a handful of Chinese Jews who come in from time to time.
A Buddhist himself, Mr. Zhang has been a vegetarian for 12 years. He started with a vegetarian Chinese restaurant in Flushing, Queens, eight years ago, and expanded to Manhattan in 2004.
Business on Christmas goes up about 30 percent over a typical weekday, as regulars combine with once-a-year pilgrims. The rookies can be spotted by their surprise when Mr. Zhang thanks them in Hebrew, saying “todah rabbah” as they pay their bill.
One customer on Monday took his takeout from Mr. Zhang and said “Xie xie”— thank you in Mandarin.
Glancing at the man’s yarmulke as he walked out the door, Mr. Zhang called after him: “Bevakasha! Lehitraot!”
“You’re welcome! See you later!”
JENNIFER MEDINA
A Sight Worth Seeing — Twice
Sometimes you have to see something twice to really see it. Especially when that something is the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, and you are with a friend from abroad who has never seen it at all. So it was that Earth Bennett, 30, and Yohei Kawagoe, 29, sat in a coffee shop on Madison Avenue, waiting for night to fall.
They had already seen the tree once, while the sun was out. But Mr. Bennett, who is originally from Maine, and Mr. Kawagoe, who grew up in a Tokyo suburb — “the New Jersey of Japan,” Mr. Bennett explained — deemed it less impressive by day. There were no lights to throw a glow into the air, Mr. Kawagoe noticed, and too many people. They decided to come back later.
In the meantime, they meandered along Fifth Avenue for an hour or so, watching men sell counterfeit handbags or hustle tourists with games of three-card monte. Then they got a warm drink and waited.
“You couldn’t do this with your friends from Williamsburg,” said Mr. Bennett, who wore an eggplant-colored turtleneck. “They would be too cool to do it.”
Mr. Kawagoe, who has been working as an assistant in a pre-kindergarten class in a small town in Pennsylvania, was more amenable to the hype. “It’s the most famous Christmas tree in the world,” he said. Mr. Bennett smiled broadly, as if in triumph.
In Japan, he noted, Christmas has no religious overtone, but is widely celebrated as a kind of holiday collage, one part Valentine’s Day, one part shopping spree. He wanted to see how it was done in America. (Not, it turns out, entirely differently.) When the sun went down, the two friends left the cafe, chatting in a mix of Japanese and English. Rain began to fall, and umbrella hawkers immediately materialized. By the time they reached the Atlas sculpture, several thousand other people appeared to have done the same. They beheld a solid crush of umbrellas, interlocked, like the shields of a Greek phalanx.
“Oh!” exclaimed Mr. Kawagoe, who took a picture. They soldiered gamely through, past a grim line of wet, would-be ice-skaters, past the other tourists. They gazed upward, catching glimpses of the now-illuminated tree through the forest of umbrellas.
The rainfall grew stronger, and Mr. Kawagoe wiped the water from his eyes, reverently.
“I’m seeing in person what I’ve only seen on TV before,” he said. “I feel like I’m really in New York now.”
NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
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