Christmas in the City

Star found Uptown

It’s easy to get caught up in your head while walking around the city and miss what’s happening around you. This happens to me all the time, but for some reason the holiday season helps me stop and actually look at my surroundings. As I was walking home from work one day I started thinking about the immense amount of things I had to do when I got home. Finals, papers, assignments, it was all catching up to me. I decided to choose the lesser of all these evils and started to ponder what to do for this blog assignment. I was drawing a complete blank when I looked up and saw the star strung across the road. It brought me back to my senses and I realized that all I had to do for this project was think about the origins of these seemingly innocent symbols. These symbols are embedded in a Christian tradition which goes back to the story of Jesus’s birth. The celebration of Christmas is done in homage to the birth of Jesus Christ, hence the name Christmas, and these symbols found in many parts of the city show how this aspect of the Christian tradition seeps into everyday life. Many people walk by these symbols every day and rather than seeing them as symbols of Christian celebration they see them as simple decorations. In modern day these symbols have been adapted to embody a holiday spirit which occupies a short tim

Tree at Lincoln Center

e in December and January, but doing this diminishes the historical roots of these symbols. They are not meant to be just a fun decoration to put up in winter, but rather to celebrate the birth of a prophet of a major religion. These symbols are so widespread that they many people who see them don’t consider the purpose behind them; they have become a normal, even typical part of people’s lives during this time of the year. This is especially prevalent in New York City, where one of the biggest displays of the holiday season is the tree at Rockefeller Center, while the tree pictured above is a much smaller representation of that it is another example of how prevalent this symbolism is. Both of these symbols are displayed in heavy traffic parts of the city, the star is displayed uptown and the tree is right next to Lincoln center. Thousands of people see these symbols and it instills the holiday spirit, but it also instills that strong background that religion has in our society. Religion pervades many aspects of life without anyone even realizing the strong influence it has. The tree and star are perfect examples because of the amount of the people who see them, I’m sure many people know the history of these symbols and when they are seen in countless places throughout this city it reinforces the strong religious roots that these symbols originated. The holiday spirit is always a time that helps me stop and look at the world around me, but it is also during this time that I find myself revisiting what I think of my own religion and this is because of the presence of these religious symbols. They bring back the religion that was taught to me as a young child and bring me back to that time where Christmas was about Jesus not just about a celebration of winter.