As a little girl, visiting New York City in the wintertime felt nothing short of magical. There was Rockefeller Center, with its towering Christmas tree and twirling skaters; Madison Avenue sparkling with decorations; and Central Park, blanketed in snow (if I was lucky), looking as if I’d walked into a freshly shaken snow globe.
These were all extraordinary sights for a kid growing up in a tropical country, where the closest thing to winter was an overly-air-conditioned movie theater. Though I would come to live in the city years later and see it through more seasoned eyes, back then, as a budding teen with a healthy stack of fashion magazines, New York meant one thing: shopping.
It’s not as if Caracas didn’t have stores — it did. I’d drag my ever-patient mother from one to the next, determined to find the trendy clothes every American kid somehow owned and I so desperately did not. Take, for instance, the coveted Members Only jacket. It wasn’t just any jacket — it had to have the telltale shoulder epaulet, the slick sheen of nylon and, most critically, come in light gray. Anything darker, and you risked instant social exile. Then there was that puffer vest my eighth-grade classmates unanimously declared essential in 1984. A trip to the States promised access to a fashion world that hadn’t quite made its way to Venezuela.
On those vacations, we’d leave Manhattan after a few boutique-filled days and visit friends in the New Jersey suburbs, which meant access to mammoth stores like Kmart. Under the glow of fluorescent lights, I’d wander in awe through its endless aisles, entranced by row after row of lotions, sprays and lip glosses that shimmered like jewels. I was the youngest of three girls, so my mother was a seasoned shopping chaperone. “Don’t go crazy,” she’d caution, but, of course, I always did, piling the cart with glittering tubes and pastel bottles while “Here Comes Santa Claus” or “White Christmas” chimed overhead, filling the air with sugary holiday warmth.
To this day, that’s what the holidays evoke for me: the glow of abundance, the music floating through the aisles and the simple joy of discovering wonder in ordinary places. I haven’t been in a Kmart in years, and these days I find more joy in a beautiful sunrise than a dozen types of hair mousse, but the feeling is the same: that quiet sense of awe when the world feels full of possibility. It now lives in moments of stillness, and in the quiet beauty of things that don’t fit in a shopping cart.
Happy Reading!
Alona Abbady Martinez
alona@bocaratonobserver.com