Yet for even the stoics of the New York City subway, wrapping a year in which rides were disrupted at turns by a dead shark and two live kittens, the holiday season poses a singular test.
With apartments too distant for a slog home on foot, and car travel better left to those filling their trunks in suburban lots, the city’s rails become something of a final annual obstacle, the space where even the sturdiest gingerbread house can be imperiled by the whims and frictions of an F train car.
There was the high-heeled shoe that did not make it — tumbling from an overstuffed bag late Friday night as its buyer dashed down the steps at Grand Central Terminal, coming to a stop at the uptown platform’s edge — and the man felled by his own gift-wrapped guitar at Union Square. It struck the bridge of his nose as he tried to swipe his MetroCard on Monday afternoon, drawing blood.
One family, racing with their hands full from a Broadway line platform at 14th Street, enlisted a boy no older than 5 to hold a plastic bag containing a soccer ball. The child swung it like a sack of change, nipping at the shins of passers-by.
Others have been more accommodating, if only slightly. Cochba Yisarel, 36, from Brownsville, Brooklyn, carried a collection of pussy willows, a gift for his godmother in Coney Island, through Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center station on Monday. He kept fellow passengers safe, he said, by waving the flowers in front of his body.
“You see me coming,” he said, thrusting three branches skyward.
Laura Miller, 27, from East Harlem, boarded an N train at 36th Street in Brooklyn, with a striped brown rod poking out of a cardboard box — “a robotic snake,” she said.
Ms. Miller usually takes the D train, but chose the less crowded N line to protect the creature and two decorated eggs, both gifts for her aunt and uncle, from the swinging elbows of crowds.
The more difficult leg of the trip was to come later, on an M60 bus to La Guardia Airport. She spent the train ride strategizing.
“On the bus, if you pretend you’re on the phone loudly talking to people, they won’t sit next to you,” she reasoned. “I’ll have a long talk with my parents about Christmas.”
Entering the station at Rockefeller Center on Friday with several bags of presents, Ronald Cabrera, 28, from Corona, Queens, said his small group had recruited a secret weapon to clear space aboard the train.
“We put her right in front,” he said, turning to Diana Cifuentes, 26, who is more than seven months pregnant. “Everybody says, ‘All right.’”
Riders seemed divided on whether the looming holiday had improved collegiality on board, observing that while season’s greetings were exchanged occasionally, many passengers chafed at the misshapen gifts and puffy coats that December promised.
The damp conditions in recent days may have also hamstrung relations, ensuring that even the most delectable Christmas treat was overpowered by a scent that called to mind a longhaired dog after a swim.
On the track beds below, apparent evidence of shopping feats and failures predominated — coupon books, partially torn; boxes that once held bottles of whiskey or wine; and an array of shopping bags, some severed at the midsection, leaving only a sheared top and a moldering handle.
Inside the station at Herald Square, where it seemed that every other rider lugged a Macy’s bag, Chris Clay, 31, from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, said that package size could be used to appraise a fellow rider’s spending habits.
“The more expensive gifts you buy are smaller,” he said. He held up two modest bags, containing jewelry and pajamas for his girlfriend.
“She gets the high quality stuff,” he said.
David Cicconi, 38, from Park Slope, Brooklyn, seemed to confirm the theory days earlier, hauling a hefty juicer through the station at Bryant Park. It was a giveaway from work that he planned to pass along to his girlfriend.
Lifting the appliance over the turnstile was worth the possible injury, he said.
“There’s always the threat of a shoulder strain,” he said, briefly knocking into another rider as he adjusted the box at his feet. “I still think I’m 19.”
On a downtown No. 3 train, Sue Kee, 41, from Canarsie, Brooklyn, suggested that the contents of her bags, sprawled in packages across the subway floor, were immaterial.
Transporting the gifts was an annual rite, she said, a reminder that some people in her life were worth the trouble.
“I love to schlep,” she said. “I’m doing it for other people.”
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