This Week: Holiday Windows & Santaland Photos, Best December Events for NYC Kids, Local Holiday Shopping Guide, Polar Express

12/5/13 - By Raven Snook

It's beginning to look a lot like... well, you know. Over the past week, my daughter and I have been rushing around playing tourist, seeing all of NYC's iconic holiday sights like Santa at Macy's, the spectacular department store holiday windows and the tree at Rockefeller Center. Admittedly, we experienced that last one from the comfort of an MTA bus. We're not crazy enough to try to get close!

Our NYC Holiday Guide includes all kinds of festive fun in the city as well as links to our tri-state-area Holiday Guides. There are some seasonal experiences you can only have outside of the five boroughs, like Polar Express Santa trains and cutting your own Christmas tree.

Since it's a new month, we also posted our December Go Lists highlighting the absolute best things to do throughout the month in NYC, Westchester, Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut. The sheer number of activities in December is overwhelming and we hope these Go Lists help you plan out your family's calendar so you don't miss the really special stuff.

And a couple of cool odds and ends: There's still time to enter this week's awesome giveaway: a family-four pack to Sahara Sam's indoor water park in New Jersey. Got a car? Then you may want to plan a night trip to see some of the best holiday displays in the outer boroughs, Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut. And our Travel site has a wonderful post about spending Christmas in Dublin, Ireland.

Here's what else we covered on the NYC site this week:

OUR LATEST VIDEOS

We kicked off the week with our December NYC Go List, which even includes a few cool non-holiday picks.

We added a bunch of brand-new posts to our Holiday Fun Guide, including a gorgeous slide show of department store holiday windows, tips for visiting Macy's Santaland, and our adventure on the Saratoga & North Creek Railway Polar Express.

It's a new month so we have a new neighborhood focus: Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. We started our coverage with a list of the top 30 things to do in the area with kids written by a Bay Ridge mom of four, so it's full of insider info.

Our Local Holiday Shopping Gift Guide features lots of ma-and-pa shops where you can pick up unique presents for kids. Our Queens blogger, Kelly, just shared her favorite holiday shopping spots in her home borough.

Our special needs writer, Michaela, profiled a great FREE program for children with special needs, the Brooklyn Public Library's The Child's Place.

Best bets for the weekend include lots of December Go List picks like Laurie Berkner in concert on the Upper West Side, the Santa Brunch and Jingle Bell Parade in Greenpoint, and the annual Santa Rescue at the New York City Fire Museum.

About the Author

Raven is a writer, editor, performer and mom, who was born and bred in NYC, just like her husband, her mother and now, her daughter. As a writer, she's contributed articles to New York Magazine, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, the New York Post, TV Guide, Better Homes and Gardens, iVillage, AOL TV and Moviefone, Parents.com, and worked as an in-house editor for ParentsConnect.com and TimeOutKids.com. As a performer, she's appeared on many downtown stages (sometimes even for pay!), a couple of obscure films and TV shows, and The Maury Povich Show as a female drag queen. She's also the founder of Hot Mama Burlesque, the world's only all-moms burlesque show. After being the NYC editor from March 2011-March 2015, she is now happy to just be a blogger as she pursues additional writing opportunities.