Christmas Season

North America has an unwritten rule: Christmas season does not officially start until the day after Thanksgiving, called Black Friday. Europe does not have such a clear starting shot, sometimes you already can smell Christmas even as early as late September.

We were in New York City the day after Thanksgiving last year. Having not really got over the jet-lag yet, we woke up really early and started wandering around the city at a time were really few people were in the streets, what sometimes was kind of spooky.

We went into Kossar's Bialys on Grand Street, in the Lower East Side. There, sipping coffee and eating an excellent bagel in the kind of environment that could not be farther from the magenta armchairs of a well-known coffee franchise but that, honestly, is exactly what makes New York interesting, exciting and worth living in, we watched the city wake up to the sound of the first Christmas song.