Thanksgiving is filled with many traditions, such as feasting on turkey alongside family and friends, splurging on Black Friday sales, and attending the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade—a yearly event held in NYC, featuring enormous balloons, marching bands, intricate floats, celebrity performers, and more. Last week’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade marked the 97th edition of the parade and featured live performances from Cher, Jon Batiste, En Vogue, Enhypen and more. Miss America 2023 Grace Stanke and U.S. Olympic silver medal gymnast Jordan Chiles also made an appearance. The new balloon characters included Blue Cats & Chugs, Beagle Scout Snoopy, and Monkey D. Luffy, with new floats representing Camp Snoopy and Palace of Sweets.
Every Thanksgiving, the parade begins its two-and-a-half mile march from Central Park West to Macy’s Herald Square to kick off the holiday season. But how exactly did this parade begin and become one of America’s most renowned Thanksgiving Day spectacles?
The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, originally called the Macy’s Christmas Parade, was first held in 1924 to promote Macy’s holiday sales and its newly expanded location in NYC’s Herald Square—the largest department store in the world at the time. The parade featured live animals from the Central Park Zoo, including elephants, camels, bears, and monkeys. The floats followed a nursery-rhyme theme, featuring the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe and Little Red Riding Hood, and the parade was closed by none other than Santa Claus, sitting in a reindeer-driven sleigh on top of a mountain of ice. This first parade was such a success that Macy’s announced it would do a holiday parade again the following year.
As the years went on, the parade has incorporated many new elements and performances while maintaining the same strong holiday spirit. In 1927, the parade stopped displaying zoo animals and replaced them with larger-than-life balloon animals. Each year the balloons included in the parade are based on current famous characters from pop culture. The very first balloon animal to be featured was Felix the Cat, and, in 1934, a Mickey Mouse balloon made its first appearance, designed by Walt Disney himself. Other famous characters that were made into balloons include Kermit the Frog (1977), Pink Panther (1988), Spider-man (1991) and Shrek (2007).
These balloons were a big hit, but they also managed to wreak some havoc on the parade. During the parade of 1997, gusts of wind up to 43 miles per hour caused 17 balloons to rip and crash to the ground. One of them even hit a lamp post, causing it to fall and injure four people in the crowd.
Nevertheless, the balloon characters remained a staple part of the parades to the point where the parade was canceled from 1942 to 1944 due to helium shortages during World War II. However, they resumed in 1945 when the war came to a close and even featured an Uncle Sam balloon.
To this day, World War II remains the only instance where the parade was canceled. They even went on in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, although it was scaled down and only lasted a block. In 2021, the parade was almost back in full swing, but all participants had to be vaccinated in accordance with CDC regulations.
