Christmas shopping in New York, Irish-style, is a contact sport - your time there might be better spent living it up writes Marion McKeone.
To hell or to Macy's. Lucky you. You don't have to choose. You can experience both at the same time, courtesy of your 170,000 friends and neighbours, all of whom came up with the same brilliant idea as you did: a Christmas shopping trip to New York.
In New York, Irish-rules shopping is a contact sport; a gruelling game of two halves. The first half is fought on the home ground of Macy's; a foul-laden, free-for-all scrummage through bargain boxes and sales rails.
The second half kicks off with a dawn to dusk endurance test at Woodbury Common. Survivor-like skills and a Big Brother set of morals are required for your grimy two-hour bus trip to a fluorescent-lit suburban shopping mall hell. Woodbury Common is where you'll pit yourself against your former best friends, your work buddies, even your own mother for something, anything that bears the magic words "final discount".
If you're not careful, your shopping trip to New York can morph into Grafton Street five minutes before the shops close on Christmas Eve.
The same queues of irritable shoppers, the same malevolent sniggers and exaggerated sighs when some hapless scavenger's credit card is declined and she has to scrabble in the end of her bargain fake Fendi bag which already has a hole in it for the $129 plus tax she needs for the Gucci patent leather thigh boots that don't quite fit but that she simply must because they have been reduced from $769 to less than €100. And you wouldn't get a pair of socks in Brown Thomas for that.
Some basic rules of maths and logic must be applied. Firstly, a bargain is not a bargain if you can only wear it on Halloween. Secondly, if your bank statements are dripping red ink for months to come as a result of your New York shopping binge, you haven't actually saved money.
In New York, it's easier to squander time than money, but it's easier still to do both.
Don't spend an entire day getting to and from some discount outlet and compounding your mistake by spending money on junk you don't need to justify the trip. Stay in Manhattan and, better still, stay within walking distance of the stores you want to visit. Between Lexington and 57th Street and Fifth Avenue and 59th you'll find Bloomingdale's, Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman. Between them, these three department stores carry just about any designer label you could imagine. They are relatively small, easy to navigate, and Bloomingdale's (59th and Lexington) in particular has some of the best shopping value in New York City. Like Macy's, Bloomingdale's offers a discount (11 per cent) to shoppers from overseas. This is applied on top of any other discounts that are offered and on every floor there are discount areas. Bloomingdale's children's department and their bedding departments (on adjacent floors) have semi-permanent sales; labels such as Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger and DKNY are routinely reduced by as much as 70 per cent. For older children, Abercrombie & Fitch on Fifth Avenue do middle-class grunge better than anyone else. Barneys (61st and Madison Avenue) is more expensive (visit in August and February for eye-popping bargains on shoes and designer labels). This upscale store is small by New York standards but perfectly formed.
The same is true of Bergdorf Goodman's (59th and Fifth Avenue). Store assistants are delightfully helpful and friendly. Commission is commission, whether it comes from your purse or Ivana Trump's. Henri Bendel is a block away, also on Fifth Avenue and the cross-town section of 57th Street between Lexington and Seventh Avenue is home to the flagship stores Prada, Gucci, Yves St Laurent, Burberry, Louis Vuitton, Chanel and countless others.
Most of New York's most famous jewellery stores - including Tiffany, Cartier, and Harry Winston - are clustered on Fifth Avenue between 55th and 59th streets. For most of us, this experience won't go beyond window-shopping - but the windows alone are worth the trip - guaranteed to transport you into an Alice in Wonderland-style trance.
Across the road from Bergdorf Goodman is the Apple Store; more a visual and aural experience than a store, this unmistakable transparent cube is the New York mecca for geeks.
For something more cuddly and less intimidating than the latest Mac-Pro, toy cathedral FAO Schwartz is just yards away.
A short subway ride downtown (take the N or the R to Prince Street) is the shopping mecca of Soho. Its streets are a wonderful warren of the cutting-edge designers and the offbeat upstarts. The flagship Prada store on the corner of Broadway and Prince is worth seeing as much for its stunning design as its latest collections.
There are small vintage stores all over the city. The cluster of Designer Resale Stores (there are three on 81st Street between 1st and 2nd Avenue) are where New York's wealthy Upper East Siders come to shed their gently worn skins. Most of these clothes aren't vintage; they're not even second-hand. They are fabulously expensive items that have rested in an air-conditioned, humidity-controlled Upper East Side closet for a weekend or two before. Most of them arrive with their four-figure labels still attached, but with a markdown of about 80 per cent.
The key to getting value for money is not to become blinkered by consumerism. Experience the New York kaleidoscope of sights and sounds.
Go ice-skating under the lights of the Rockefeller Plaza's enormous Christmas tree. Take a walk in Central Park.
At the International Center of Photography at Sixth Avenue and 43rd Street, an exhibition of the life and work of Robert Capa, the legendary war photographer, provides some sobering perspective. A few minutes away, on 53rd and 6th Avenue, is the Museum of Modern Art. If you only visit one museum, make it MoMA. And for those whose feet haven't been worn to leaden stumps, there is Museum Mile on Fifth Avenue, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney and the Guggenheim just moments from each other.
Catch a Broadway how, or better still, spend an evening at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, home of the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, and the New York Philharmonic. You may have seen The Nutcracker or heard Handel's Messiah a thousand times, but never in surroundings like this.
Have a martini at the Carlyle Hotel bar (73rd and Madison). It's not cheap, but you can gorge on their gourmet nibbles and see how the other half really lives. An evening at Nobu 57 or Balthazar will be unforgettable. You won't leave Elaine's (87th and 2nd Avenue) without a tale to tell (in fact with the right drink and the wrong company you mightn't leave there at all).
New York at any time is an unforgettable visual feast, an exhilarating overload for the senses. But at Christmas it's even more so. To hell with the shopping. Have some fun. Everything except your time here will be forgotten or left languishing in a wardrobe.