Do your holiday shopping fantasies include glittering lights and beautiful gifts — or a “balloon ride” and a three-second jog on a “running track?”

Welcome to “experiential retail” — a mushrooming gimmick to make us feel we’re having fun without spending a dime.

A wave of in-store demonstrations, hands-on customer workshops and low-grade special effects are supposed to save us from the Amazon-age blight of empty stores. Mostly ranging from tame to lame, the “experiences” typically proved to be slightly cooler-than-average settings to try on makeup, colorful backdrops for Instagram selfies, and tricks to make you spend more than you planned.

Just in time for Black Friday, we went shopping for the experience.

1. 1. History for your handbag

   Gucci, 63 Wooster St.

   

   This beautiful boutique offers a screening room where you put on a cat-ears headset and watch one of the fun style- and art-focused documentary films that are run in rotation. There’s no sales pitch — the flicks are just to put you in a good mood about the Soho neighborhood and the creative scene of which Gucci considers itself part.

   I enjoyed an hourlong reminiscence of Soho in 1974, when the then-gritty neighborhood was home to galleries and illegal loft apartments, narrated by art and music figures of the time. Descriptions of Fanelli Cafe, once a haunt of artists such as Laurie Anderson and Robert Rauschenberg, gave me a nostalgic thrill.

   But be careful of sales pitches disguised as customer service. A staffer uses an iPad to let you “customize” a tote bag with add-ons like python-fabric stripes and monogram letters — a way to make a classic Gucci product look cheap while ­actually raising its cost from $1,490 to $2,200.

2. 2. Test-drive your sneaks

   Nike, 529 Broadway

   

   This huge, five-level athletic-footwear palace is fun if you don’t take its “athletics” too seriously. A five-hoops basketball shooting range on the ground floor and a single-hoop court upstairs let you test their sneakers under something less than real-life conditions. (You must first let a salesperson sign you up as a Nike “member.”) It’s a lively scene on the first floor where customers show off your moves in front of bemused, more sedentary shoppers. But I didn’t see a soul taking shots on the less heavily trafficked fifth floor in four visits.

   Don’t look for a widely reported “soccer court” — it was yanked months ago.

3. 3. Heaven scent

   Muji, 475 Fifth Ave.

   

   The Japanese luxury-accessories purveyor features an “aroma lab” that lets you “create” your desired fragrance to waft through an aroma diffuser, one of their signature products. But the only thing that’s creative is the sales pitch. A staffer merely offered to let me sample one of 48 different scents that drift across the floor. Despite media claims that they’d blend scents to create a customized aroma, I was twice told that it wasn’t possible. An “embroidery station” lets us stamp images, letters and numbers onto a notebook page to help choose one for pricey stationery. But we can see them just as easily in the display.

4. 4. Zen out

   Lululemon, 597 Fifth Ave.

   

   According to Whimn.com, the “active­wear” maker’s jumbo store “provides busy, stressed-out folk with zen pods where they can settle into comfortable cushions, put on a pair of headphones and tune in to one of 12 different self-guided meditations.” Translation: a few low-slung seats — no pods — on a mezzanine. I found only a few shoppers texting on their iPhones. Catch the excitement while you can — the space is already up for lease.

5. 5. Insta fame

   Timberland, 511 Fifth Avenue.

   

   This big pop-up outlet (through the end of year) boasts several theoretically Instagramable settings. There’s a wall of 2,000 live plants. A “rain room” features tube-like LED ceiling fixtures that are supposed to look like falling rain. They don’t. A “snow room” includes boot prints on the floor. The idea is to try on shoes and walk on the footprints before a backdrop of fake, falling flakes.

6. 6. Be Usain Bolt

   Adidas, 565 Fifth Ave.

   

   “The largest Adidas store on the planet” features the planet’s shortest “running track” — about 30 meters (not quite 100 feet). A clip-on gizmo tells whether a pair of running shoes is right for your toes, ankles, soles and heels. I saw exactly no one using it in three visits. Second-floor bleach­ers offer tired tourists a panoramic view of an empty lot across the street.

7. 7. Sleighing it

   Bloomingdale’s at Lexington Avenue and 59th Street

   

   Easily the most fun “experience” was a virtual-reality ride on Santa’s sleigh (lower level near the Flip Burger cafe). Two moving-seat pods and a set of VR goggles had kids and grown-ups smiling, laughing and gently rocking for a three-minute sky trip behind a pair of friendly reindeer.

   The Vrpark-designed gizmos come with more warnings than for the Coney Island Cyclone — don’t get on if you suffer “photosensitive seizures” or have “anxiety concerns or significant fears,” which might disqualify most of the 8.5 million New Yorkers.

   An attendant seat-belts you in. The simulated airborne journey through snowbound villages, over mountains and bridges, is near-Las Vegas-quality, except for hokey fireworks at the end.

   It’s refreshingly free of any merchandise pitch. Be warned: The line forms quickly when it opens at noon and will only get longer in the days ahead.

8. 8. Vive la France!

   L’Occitane, 555 Fifth Ave.

   

   The French beauty-products and fragrance emporium promises “a 360-degree hot-air balloon ride” over the south of France. It fell continents short of the actual balloon flight I once took in Kenya, just a fuzzy, 2½-minute “flight” viewed through giant, virtual-reality goggles fastened to your head like the rat cage in “1984.”

   A friendly saleswoman performed a hand massage as lavender mist blew in my face — but only on my left hand. What about the right? “Sorry, there’s only time for one,” she said.

   For a more down-to-earth “experience,” they’ll photograph you on a stationary bike in front of a Provençal street backdrop.

9. 9. Sleep it off

   Casper, 627 Broadway

   

   Casper’s whimsical subway ads are adorable. But its experiential stores literally put us to sleep. Casper’s mock boudoirs are tucked into cute mini-houses. Forget hanky-panky: each “house” has a big round window for the staff to keep an eye on you. For a more private snooze, you can book a 45-minute nap in the comfier confines of Casper’s “Dreamery” at nearby 196 Mercer St. But it costs $25 and your slumber is likely to be broken by the sound of chattering and giggling next door.