Still the most wonderful city in the world….. and even better with my kids!

The skyline of New York still takes my breath away. Sailing in on the Staten Island Ferry, we are blessed with glittering December sunshine and sharply clear skies, while we watch the skyscrapers growing before us, taller and taller, until the ferry pulls up and we tumble out at Manhattan’s doorstep. We point out Lady Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge, eat our egg-and-bacon bagels, and take closeups of the seagulls with our new iPhones.

The last time Jake and Eli were here, they were visiting Uncle Paul as one-year-old babies. I love being back here with them now, to see what they think with the canvas of their world travels behind them.

The boys agree, NYC is one of the best cities ever! The glamorous hotels, elegant architecture, busy sidewalks, good food, it’s everything I remember and even better as an adult with money to stay in the nice part of town. Our room at the Warwick hotel looks over 6th avenue lined with Christmas trees, and we walked at least a hundred city blocks between Central Park and the Financial District. There is too much to see one weekend! But we are here to do our best.

At Central Park we found a Christmas market, and a leafy area littered with fall colors where New Yorkers were training their dogs….

Then we stopped in at Grand Central Terminal and the New York Public Library.

We went ice skating beneath the skyscrapers and imagined what it would be like to live in one. Do you feel the wind up there? And how do they pump water all the way up to the penthouse??

Like every good NYC tourist, we booked dinner and a show for Saturday night. The noise and chaos of Times Square still overwhelms me! But the boys made their way through it all alone, to meet us at the Rosevale Kitchen, where Mike and I were having a drink. I was afraid maybe the chaos of Times Square would be too much for 16 year olds in NY for the first time, but I guess we’ve trained them well. They casually showed up, slid into the booth, and ordered Cokes like they’d lived here their whole lives.

Rockefeller Center at Christmas time is iconic Americana, and it’s the same now as it was 20 years ago. The angels, skating rink and Christmas huts swarm with people, and the line of children outside FAO Schwartz snakes around the block. We ate pizza, browsed the NBA store, re-lived scenes from Home Alone, and marveled at the Louis Vuitton on 5th Avenue shaped like a giant suitcase.

And we saw churches! Straight from the Old World, they are a testament that Americans were not always cowboys, and at least the early Americans believed in beauty, too. The stained glass and carved stonework are artistic visions, and it’s amazing to imagine the Europeans who survived that long boat ride across the ocean, still arriving with enough energy and determination to build New York. Those settlers were committed to making their new Forever Home glorious, as beautiful as what they left behind. Thank goodness for those early dreamers from Europe! They prioritized the art of elegance, back in a time when construction valued beauty more than building things fast and cheap. Thanks to them, America is not all ugly, and nowhere is this more true than New York.

There is a lot of time gone by since those early days. And yet…..

We seem to keep finding ourselves in new beginnings. Who knows what the future holds.