I’ve been spending my evenings with the Gilmores lately, nestled in a small fictitious Connecticut town called Stars Hollow where each of the holidays is a call for a festival or celebration of some kind. This marathon obsession with the long-over Gilmore Girls is the source of my high expectations for the New York Festival of Lights. Pair that with my building excitement surrounding upcoming Chanukah traditions, a Pinterest board dedicated solely to fairy lights, and a childhood spent driving through suburbia’s finest Christmas light displays, and perhaps I was setting myself up for a bit of disappointment.
I first came across the event while trolling Twitter for activities in the city that weekend. “New York Festival of Lights,” the link read, and immediately I glimpsed flashes of Christmas lights and scents of hot chocolate; I could already feel the crunch of snow compacting under my boots, never mind that the date read early November. “Family friendly,” it went on, and I pictured kids trailing around under rows of bulbs, parents walking arm in arm around the area, groups of college kids in thick knit sweaters celebrating the end of midterms season. This was not only a call for a real live Stars Hollow, it was my childhood reimagined.
“We never go out,” I told my sister in the message I wrote to her with this link attached, “It’s time we explore New York a little.” She agreed, the date was set and we were already imagining just how Gilmore-like we would feel at the end of all of this.
The train ride down to Dumbo was relatively uneventful. We had dressed in obligatory scarves and boots for the cold fall night, taking the 6 train down towards Brooklyn. We climbed the stairs and November greeted us on the other side of the glass doors. All was quiet and we began walking towards the promenade, eventually making our way down to the most beautiful view we had seen in a while. The Statue of Liberty was to our left, a strip of skyscrapers to our right. It was beautiful but our promised world of string lights was nowhere to be seen.
After some Google-mapping and calls for directions, we started the walk towards Brooklyn Bridge and saw the sky light up a mile or two away. We followed the crowd of well-dressed festival goers, admiring outfits as we went, and finally arrived at the mouth of a tunnel where we felt the beat pulsing and saw the neon lights breaking out of the walls. Needless to say, the imagined cups of hot chocolate were nowhere to be seen.
There was a DJ at the center of the room, swaying to his creations, and a tight crowd surrounding him with the core group of here-to-dance people at the center. The further out you went, the more subdued the crowd became and that’s where we found ourselves. We stood just behind some very tall girls periodically manically smiling at each other and just in front of a couple of guys in their work clothes slightly swaying to the beat.
As we acclimated to this unexpected twist of events, the girls in front of us started really dancing. I’m talking hardcore dancing; hips swinging, arms waving, with the added bonus of laughter that rivaled even the loudest giggles in the Stern caf. It was a particular arm wave that shoved me into a guy behind me who returned my apologies with a too-friendly smile that made me realize it was time to go. After a swift and knowing nod, I grabbed my sister’s hand and we headed for the exit. We took a couple of photos of the light patterns on the ceiling, had a short moment of panic at the thought of being pickpocketed before finding our keys and etched our names into the lit up scratchboard. We headed for the exit and were met with the relative peace on the street.
About an hour later, we were walking up Madison Avenue back in our beloved Manhattan, Starbucks lattes in hand. We reminisced about the lit-up houses during the holiday season in Skokie where we grew up, and returned back to my dorm room to an episode of Gilmore Girls. It was the one where Rory and Lorelai spend Thanksgiving hopping from host to host, strategically eating their way through Stars Hollow, admiring the already set-out Christmas lights around town. The contrast to that evening’s events was strong, but so was our coffee. New York Festival of Lights, you disappointed me. Try again next year, this time with at least one string of fairy lights.