SDMB,
I am coming into town with my 2 teenage sons and staying in River North. We will be arriving Thanksgiving day and staying through the weekend. We have stayed downtown quite a few times during the Christmas Season but never on Thanksgiving Day itself. We will most likely be arriving after the parade is over and that crowd has gone. My question is what will it be like in the evening? will the stores on Michigan be open? Will there be people out and about doing dinner and shopping etc? Or is it more of a calm before the storm before Black Friday shopping.
I dunno about Chicago in particular, but restaurants are a general exception to businesses being closed on holidays. In fact, the nicer the restaurant, the more likely it is that they will be offering and promoting special holiday meal offers. Hotel restaurants in particular. Ideally, they’ll suck you in for a fancy meal, get you snockered and then sell an overnight room to sleep it off in.
There are Mag Mile protests scheduled for this Friday. I doubt it will be anything dangerous or even unpleasant and possibly even sort of fun but something an out of towner should know.
Oh, it’s open on Thanksgiving Day? I highly recommend Christkindlmarket, there’s fun stuff to eat there, too! And yeah, you shouldn’t have much issue with restaurants on the holiday, just the rest. Besides Christkindlmarket, apparently. I go a couple times every season, once alone so I can go early and thread the crowd and get to the booths I buy from every year, and then a second time with a group so we can eat and get tipsy on Glühwein.
jnglmassiv,
thanks for the info. I figured there would be protests. We were there Christmas and we just stayed away from the area they were in. Wasn’t anything scary at all. And we go to ChristKindl every year, always one of our highlights of our Christmas trip.