And a happy new year!

If you travel to New York over Christmas, the trip won’t be complete until you brave the crowds to see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center . You can see this year’s version of the tree in the photo below, which I took on Dec. 10. You may not be able to tell it, but the day was colder than a subway ticket-seller’s attitude toward out-of-towners.

My point: After having been handed a transfer by a bus driver, with assurances that it would work on the subway, we discovered that it wouldn’t. When we complained to the ticket-seller in question, she answered as if she were talking to a 2-year-old: “This is the suuub -way. That, as is clearly stated on the ticket, is for the bus .”

Merry Christmas to you, too!

Photo by Dan Webster