Almost every Thanksgiving, my cousin from New York comes to town. He stays at my sister’s house in the ‘burbs. She assigns him small tasks like setting the table or buying flowers. He’ll gripe or joke about taking such orders while, after all, he is on vacation, but we all know he loves it. Like most people, I think, he loves to contribute.

This year, he arranged to have a friend of his from Kansas meet up with him in Chicago and share a holiday meal with our family. So, I got an extra job this season. I created a little tour of my town for us to take the day before Turkey Day. I love showing off Chicago. My cousin’s friend likes seeing gi-normous buildings, a big change from Toronto, Kansas. And, I think it’s good for my sister to get kitchen hands unfamiliar with her traffic patterns out of her kitchen on the eve of her annual feast.

Well, yes, I am a part-time city highlights guide here in Chicago, and I didn’t have to refer to Fodor’s or Lonely Planet or any Googled guides to come up with ideas, but planning a day to spend with William and Jean Marie was a little different than my usual routine. I gave their visit a lot of thought. I wanted to take them to places I love, and I wanted to give them a feeling for Chicago.

I met them at the commuter train station then we walked over to visit the great hall at Union Station. We looked for the staircase where, in the famous scene from the movie, The Untouchables, the baby buggy bounced down the steps in slow motion while Elliott Ness’s posse had a shoot-out with members of Capone’s gang. We stopped at the Federal Reserve Bank where they give a short talk, point out a collection of three dollar bills and hand out souvenir packages of shredded money they took out of circulation ($364 worth). We went to the Chapel in the Sky, a lesser known tourist attraction in town, a 40 seat Methodist chapel at the top of an office building. It’s in the Guinness Book of World Records as the tallest church in the world.

We walked to Macy’s flagship store in Chicago, still called Marshall Fields, its original name, by locals. At one entrance is an incredible art glass ceiling designed by Tiffany. It is made of over 1.6 million pieces of hand-blown Favrile glass, a real wow. We saw more Tiffany glass at the Cultural Center then walked to Daley Plaza where we stood with hundreds of freezing Chicagoans and watched the official Christmas tree lighting ceremony. After an introduction by actress Joan Cusack, the mayor flipped the switch that turned on a generous coat of lights covering a 70 foot tall, star-topped blue spruce. We finished the evening with a wonderful dinner at a Turkish restaurant in my neighborhood and a mesmerizing classical guitar performance at Katerina’s.

I was amazed at how everything we did flowed into the next thing. I was so happy that my guests enjoyed what I had planned for them and even more thrilled that other things I could not possibly have imagined came together at the perfect time.

Right after the lights were turned on to illuminate the city’s official Christmas tree, fireworks went off over City Hall and a small flock of doves was set loose to fly down Washington Street. When we got to the el train platform to take the brown line back to my neighborhood, we still had a sort of childlike fireworks hangover. (It takes a while to remember proper English after “Oooh” and “Ahhh” is all you can utter.) As our train was approaching from one direction, we looked in the other direction just in time to see the CTA’s Christmas train, a short chain of cars decorated for special holiday runs. I had heard about it, but I had never seen it before.

We blinked our eyes. We shook our heads. We reached for our cameras. We grinned stupidly at each other. How lucky!

Arriving anywhere just in time to see something stupendously beautiful, outrageously silly, or simply rare is no small thing.