In Between Holidays, Nothing Happens but Magic

clipped from www.nytimes.com In Between Holidays, Nothing Happens but Magic Damon Winter/The New York Times Visitors filled the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue despite the cold. Even ducks in Central Park had the capacity to inspire wonder. By MANNY FERNANDEZ On Tuesday morning, tourists from around the world and across the country trained their eyes and their cameras on a group of loudmouthed New Yorkers, some of the rare locals left behind this holiday season: the ducks at a Central Park pond. This is a week of suspended animation in the city, in between holidays, when the great systems of New York — the schools, the courts, the communications media, Wall Street, City Hall, the bodegas in Queens — slow to an administrative crawl or shut down altogether, when New York City belongs not to New Yorkers, but to Spaniards, Italians, Canadians, Germans, Californians. Tens of thousands of people have left town to go back home, while tens of thousands of others have left home to come to town. Damon Winter/The New York Times