Art

On Thursday, a polka-dot balloon by Yayoi Kusama—the ninety-year-old Japanese artist who is now Instagram famous for her mirrored rooms—will float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. For a more sombre art outing, contemplate the hard truths behind the holiday’s myth of peaceful settler-native relations. “Urban Indian: Native New York Now,” at the Museum of the City of New York, gives equal weight to art works and traditional forms, like quilting and powwows. In the show “Miffed Blue Return,” at the 47 Canal gallery (located at 291 Grand St.), the experimental filmmaker Sky Hopinka’s two-channel piece “Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer” is a beautiful and quietly devastating primer on the role that the Colonial-era Fort Marion, on the northeast coast of Florida, played in the development of forced assimilation.—Andrea K. Scott

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Night Life

In 1965, the story goes, Arlo Guthrie was spending Thanksgiving with friends when he took out the trash and found himself jailed for littering—an arrest that would ultimately help the folk princeling avoid the draft. The incident led to Guthrie’s most beloved creation: “Alice’s Restaurant,” a discursive eighteen-minute talking blues that forever wed the singer to Thanksgiving. His annual date at Carnegie Hall stretches back to 1967, but Guthrie claims that it will terminate this Saturday, with a wish for “younger generations to take the torches we carried.”—Jay Ruttenberg

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Food & Drink: Tables for Two

The other night at Il Fiorista, a new restaurant in NoMad, a burly, bearded, and surprisingly poetic server caught a request for a cocktail recommendation and dived for the end zone. “This one’s like running down sunlit streets in Tuscany and throwing confetti in the air,” he said. “And that one’s like getting into a new car and driving through smoky hills with citrus turns.” Il Fiorista (“the florist,” in Italian) is not a subtle place. Well into November, a large potted hydrangea tree sat on the sidewalk beside the entrance. Inside, diners are met by an enormous table topped with a towering arrangement of budding branches, plus botanical-themed products and bouquets for sale.—Hannah Goldfield

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The Theatre

The Dickens classic “A Christmas Carol” receives a warm, solicitous production at the Lyceum, directed by Matthew Warchus (“Matilda”) and adapted by Jack Thorne (“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”), with a wild-haired, wild-eyed Campbell Scott as Ebenezer Scrooge. The topnotch cast includes the delightful Andrea Martin, impishly foreboding as the Ghost of Christmas Past, and the golden-voiced LaChanze, as a reproachful, Caribbean-inflected Ghost of Christmas Present. Tiny Tim is played alternately by Jai Ram Srinivasan and Sebastian Ortiz, both of whom have cerebral palsy; at a recent matinée, Ortiz brought the house down with his natural depiction of generous humanity. Arrive early for pre-show live music and to catch clementines and cookies tossed by performers to theatregoers, nearly every one.—Shauna Lyon

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Movies

“Metropolitan,” Whit Stillman’s sharp-bladed dissection, from 1990, of the young and restless segment of what he calls New York’s “U.H.B.,” the urban haute bourgeoisie, pronounced “uhb” (i.e., bratty rich kids and their hangers-on), is one of the most emblematic and oft-cited of recent first films. (It’s also a classic holiday-season movie.) It screens on Sunday at Metrograph, introduced by Stillman (who will also present his third feature, “The Last Days of Disco,” later that day.)—Richard Brody

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Classical Music

The cellist Benjamin Larsen started Concerts on the Slope, in 2012, as a forum for young musicians to present thoughtfully curated programs. On Sunday, in the series’ home base, at St. John’s Episcopal Church, in Park Slope, Larsen and his colleagues present a concert of string quartets by American composers. Robert Sirota’s “Wave Upon Wave” is the third in his trilogy of quartets; at the time of its première, Sirota said that it “is about our fears, our hopes, and our prayers that we will triumph over the forces of darkness which threaten to overwhelm us.” In that vein, Samuel Barber’s Quartet in B Minor offers its middle movement, the nearly anthemic “Adagio for Strings,” as a monument to grief and catharsis.—Hélène Werner

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Dance

Boris Asafiev, an early-twentieth-century Russian musicologist, called Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker” “a symphony of childhood”: many of the sensations we feel as children—fear, extreme excitement, an attraction to things we don’t understand, the desire to grow up and the simultaneous desire to remain a child forever—are reflected in the music. The choreographer George Balanchine understood this and made a ballet, in 1954, that is still performed by New York City Ballet today. In “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” (at the David H. Koch, November 29th-January 5th), fun and coziness are tinged with terror, and the world of the imagination is just as real as the Biedermeier furniture and the dancing children.—Marina Harss

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