One of my friends once referred to me as “cold fragile”, which is a nicer way of saying, “pathetic pansy who can’t handle winter”. So while most of my fellow Wend bloggers are probably out cycling, hiking, and skin diving in frozen lakes through a hole that they cut in the ice with their teeth, you also get me – whose default November-March activity is staying indoors. By the radiator. Whimpering.
But on a not-so-frigid night this week, I did brave the cold in order to see (and share) how Brooklyn celebrates the holidays. (Creepy Santas, industrial forklifts, and Mariah Carey are involved.)
I started by wandering north, through streets lined with multi-family rowhouses from the 1920s. Despite our chic, one-stop-from-Manhattan location, this neighborhood doesn’t do elegant subtlety when it comes to holiday décor – subscribing instead to the “More is More” method of house-dressing. What do I mean? Well…
Y’know, I’m just not sure that the people who live here are really committed to Christmas. Sure, we’ve got a nativity scene, a nutcracker, a silver-sequined Disco Santa, a dancing polar bear tableau… and what appears to be an infestation of peppermint drops. (Oooh, that’s bad – you know that once those things are in your house, they get into the walls and breed like crazy.) But where’s the big S.C. and his lovely wife?
Oh — they’re watching from behind the windows!
Because that’s not creepy.
Moving northward, the warmly-lit residential streets began to give way to the low, gray, industrial buildings that dominate the area near the Gowanus Canal. There were a few vestiges of holiday spirit – a stray garland of lights draped over the closed gate of a loading dock; a wreath hung on an office door. And then, faint but growing stronger, I began to hear the sound of… singing.
Mariah Carey, to be exact, doing her hit rendition of All I Want for Christmas Is You.
Love it or hate it, this song is like a shot to the neck of Joy-Juice – and I sped toward the source, eager to see who was injecting holiday cheer into the drab industrial landscape. I approached the open door of one of the buildings, and the sound grew stronger, and I rounded the corner with a spring in my step, and I saw…
This.
Which, judging by the vast bales of compressed paper and various forklifts, is our recycling center – a recycling center full of song!
And also, a grim reminder of just where all that wrapping paper is going to end up.
Happy Holidays!
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