New York during the holidays is the city’s biggest inside joke. Not the fun kind. The kind you overhear on the train at 2 AM, where someone mutters “this place is sick” and everyone silently agrees. The rest of the country imagines a snow globe. We get a month-long psychological stress test wrapped in LED lights. It’s marketed as magic. It functions like punishment. And every year, the gap between the myth and the reality gets wider, brighter, and more unhinged.

Start with Rockefeller Center. That tree is the universal symbol of forced holiday enthusiasm. It’s an exhausted spruce dragged from upstate to stand in the middle of a concrete canyon while millions of people with selfie sticks clog the sidewalks like cholesterol. The tree is fine. The experience is war. You don’t see the tree. You see winter jackets pressed into your face. You see a parade of tourists moving with the speed and awareness of spilled molasses. You see a city pretending this is normal. We rate it: spiritually corrosive.

Walk uptown to Fifth Avenue. The famous windows. The ones every influencer posts as if they discovered holiday joy while blocking traffic. The displays are beautiful, yes. They always are. But the crowd is a social experiment in human patience. No one is looking at anything. Everyone is filming everything. Someone’s kid is holding a pretzel like a weapon. The sidewalks feel like they’re shrinking. You start imagining escape routes like you’re in a hostage situation. This isn’t charm. This is retail-themed trench warfare. Rating: absolute menace.

Bryant Park’s Winter Village is the most honest holiday attraction because it doesn’t even try to hide the grift. Here, the hot chocolate costs more than your childhood memories. Every booth sells something marketed as artisanal but suspiciously identical to everything at Union Square. The rink is a demolition derby run by people who have never seen ice before. The entire place is engineered to drain your wallet and your will to live. Rating: commercialized frostbite.

Union Square Market is where hopes go to limp. You enter thinking you might find a unique gift. You leave with a headache, a mediocre empanada, and a vague sense that you’ve been tricked. It’s hot even when it’s cold. It’s crowded even when it’s empty. Half the vendors are selling versions of the same five items. And the aisles feel one wrong step from a stampede. Rating: festive claustrophobia.

Dyker Heights lights are impressive in scale, overwhelming in spirit, and impossible to enjoy without losing feeling in your toes. People love them because they’re bold. People hate them because they require you to stand in residential streets behind crowds who treat driveways like public parks. And the traffic? A Greek tragedy. You spend more time breathing exhaust fumes than looking at lights. Rating: suburban spectacle with a side of regret.

Radio City’s Christmas Spectacular is the only event that deserves its hype. The Rockettes are flawless. The precision, the spectacle, the nostalgia. They show up. The issue is everyone else. The lobby is a human soup. The lines feel medieval. The tickets require a small loan. The merch table looks like a clearance rack from Santa’s bankruptcy proceedings. And you leave knowing you won’t return for five years unless dragged by family. Rating: brilliance surrounded by chaos.

Now let’s talk about holiday-themed bars. Every December, a handful of already cramped Manhattan spots slap some tinsel on a ceiling lamp and triple the cocktail prices. These pop-ups are marketed as whimsical. In reality, they’re sweat lodges filled with people wearing itchy sweaters and drinking eggnog that tastes like melted wax. You wait forty minutes for a drink that punishes you for ordering it. Rating: seasonal self-harm.

Finally, the apocalypse: Times Square on New Year’s Eve. There is no experience more horrifying. People voluntarily stand outside for ten hours in winter weather, packed like livestock, wearing adult diapers for convenience. For a ball drop. A literal ball. If this is your idea of celebration, intervention might be necessary. The city knows it’s chaos. The police know it’s chaos. Every person who lives here avoids that neighborhood like it has an active gas leak. Rating: societal failure.

What’s wild is that New York keeps selling this fantasy. The ads, the movies, the influencer reels—they create an NYC that doesn’t exist anywhere outside a marketing deck. And we, the residents, inherit the fallout. Higher prices. Higher congestion. Higher stress. It’s the holiday season as performance art. Everyone plays along because the alternative is admitting the entire system is powered by illusion.

But the truth is simple. The real New York holiday spirit isn’t in the lights or the markets or the tourist traps. It’s in the micro-moments. Your local bodega hanging a crooked string of lights that’s been there since Bloomberg. The bakery in Jackson Heights where people line up at 6 AM for coquito bread that sells out by noon. The uncle in the Bronx blasting salsa while arguing about who ruined the pasteles this year. The friend who knows which bar still pours an honest whiskey without calling it a “holiday infusion.” These moments are small, unpolished, and deeply human. They’re not built for marketing. They’re built for survival.

So yes, the holidays in New York are a scam. A glamorous, entertaining, deeply inconvenient scam. But it’s our scam. The one we complain about nonstop and still participate in because being a New Yorker means loving the city even when it abuses you. Especially when it abuses you.

In the end, the holidays here aren’t magical. They’re a test. A gauntlet. A ritual of collective delusion. And every year, we sprint through it because we’re wired that way. We thrive on dysfunction. We treat chaos like oxygen. And we know that when the tree comes down and the tourists disappear, the city resets. It exhales. It returns to its real self. The version only we get to live.

Rating: New York holiday season earns the crown for worst, worst-er, and worstest. A beautifully miserable tradition we’ll continue surviving because quitting isn’t in our DNA.

By New York Eats Here!

Like this? Explore more from: