Jonathan Berk captured the spirit of the season on Devonshire Street, made to look like New York for the Ryan Reynolds/Will Ferrell musical "Christmas Carol" remake. They did a good job: Nobody was yelling "Yankees suck!"

Adam Castiglioni discovered that somebody's turned Devonshire Street downtown into a giant New York City cab stand, either because there were all these New Yorkers up here who are very particular about how they get back home or because somebody's filming something downtown where Boston stands in for New York (it's been done before).

The annual ball drop in Times Square tonight is the vestige of what was once a network of daily time-ball drops in US coastal cities, including Boston, to help mariners calibrate their shipboard clocks - vital to determining their location once they were at sea. Read more.