Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is an annual parade in New York City presented by the U.S.-based department store chain Macy's. The Parade first took place in 1924, tying it for the second-oldest Thanksgiving parade in the United States with America's Thanksgiving Parade in Detroit (with both parades being four years younger than Philadelphia's Thanksgiving Day Parade). The three-hour parade is held in Manhattan, ending outside Macy's Herald Square, takes place from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Thanksgiving Day, and has been televised nationally on NBC since 1953. The Parade's workforce is made up of Macy's employees and their friends and family, all of whom work as volunteers.

History

Early history

In 1924, store employees marched to Macy's Herald Square, the flagship store on 34th Street, dressed in vibrant costumes. There were floats, professional bands and live animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo. At the end of that first parade, Santa Claus was welcomed into Herald Square. At this first parade, Santa was enthroned on the Macy's balcony at the 34th Street store entrance, where he was then crowned "King of the Kiddies". With an audience of over 250,000 people, the parade was such a success that Macy's declared it would become an annual event, despite media reports only barely covering the first parade.

The Macy's parade was enough of a success to push Ragamuffin Day, the typical children's Thanksgiving Day activity from 1870 into the 1920s, into obscurity. Ragamuffin Day featured children going around and performing a primitive version of trick-or-treating, a practice that by the 1920s had come to annoy most adults. The public backlash against such begging in the 1930s (when most Americans were struggling in the midst of the Great Depression) led to promotion of alternatives, including Macy's parade. While ragamuffin parades that competed with Macy's would continue into the 1930s, the competition from Macy's would overwhelm the practice, and the last ragamuffin parade in New York City would take place in 1956.

Anthony "Tony" Frederick Sarg loved to work with marionettes from an early age. After moving to London to start his own marionette business, Sarg moved to New York City to perform with his puppets on the street. Macy's heard about Sarg's talents and asked him to design a window display of a parade for the store.

Growth and changes

Through the 1930s, the parade continued to grow, with crowds of over one million people lining the parade route in 1933. The first Mickey Mouse balloon entered the parade in 1934. The annual festivities were broadcast on local radio stations in New York City from 1932 to 1941 and resumed in 1945, running through 1951.

The parade was suspended from 1942 to 1944 as a result of World War II because rubber and helium were needed for the war effort. The parade resumed in 1945 and became known nationwide shortly afterwards, having been prominently featured in the 1947 film ''Miracle on 34th Street'', which included footage of the 1946 festivities. The event had its first broadcast on network television in 1948 (see ). From 1984 to 2019, the balloons were made by Raven Industries of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, through its Raven Aerostar division.

Since 1985, the parade was traditionally led by the New York City Police Department Highway Patrol. In 2019, the cast of Sesame Street led the parade in honor of the show's 50th anniversary.

Following an incident in 2005 where a balloon knocked over a street light and injured spectators (see ), new safety measures were incorporated in 2006 to prevent accidents and balloon-related injuries. One measure taken was the installation of wind measurement devices to alert parade organizers to any unsafe conditions that could cause the balloons to behave erratically. In addition, parade officials implemented a measure to keep the balloons closer to the ground during windy conditions. New York City law prohibits Macy's from flying the full-size balloons if sustained winds exceed or wind gusts exceed ; New York's tall buildings and mostly uniform grid plan can amplify wind velocity on city streets. This law, imposed in 1997, has never been activated, despite several close calls; the only time the parade balloons were ever grounded was in 1971. Each balloon has a risk profile to determine handling in windy conditions; taller, upright balloons are rotated to appear horizontal and face downward in such situations (as was the case in 2019, when a grounding was narrowly averted). The remaining floats and performances will continue as scheduled should the balloons be grounded.

The 2018 parade was the coldest to date, with the temperature at 19 °F (-7.2 °C) during the event. The warmest was in 1933 at 69 °F (20.5 °C). The 2006 parade was the wettest with 1.72" (49 mm) of rain. Actresses Caitlin Kinnunen and Isabelle McCalla's kiss during '' The Proms performance at the 2018 parade received significant media attention for being the first broadcast of a same-sex kiss in the parade's history.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, the 2020 parade was downsized and closed to the public—being filmed as a broadcast-only event in the Herald Square area. There were 88% fewer participants, and social distancing was enforced. The event did not include college and high school marching bands (with the affected bands having been reinvited for 2021), nor any participant under 18 years of age. Balloons were tethered to a "specially rigged anchor vehicle framework of five specialty vehicles" rather than carried by handlers. Mayor of New York City Bill de Blasio stated that it will " ot bea live parade, but something that will really give us that warmth and that great feeling we have on Thanksgiving day." In 2021, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade returned to its traditional in-person procession with 6,500 participants marching in the Parade.

Balloons

The balloons were introduced in 1928, replacing live zoo animals. Sarg's large animal-shaped balloons were produced by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio from the 1920s through 1980. That year there was no procedure to deflate the balloons, and they were simply released. In 1928 five of the giant balloons were designed and filled with helium to rise above and slowly deflate for whoever was lucky enough to capture ''the contestants'' in Macy's "balloon race and return them for a reward of $100 (equivalent to more than $1,600 with inflation as of 2021), this lasted until 1932.

The balloons in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade have had several varieties. The oldest is the novelty balloon class, consisting of smaller balloons ranging widely in size and handled by between one and thirty people (the smallest balloons are shaped like human heads and fit on the heads of the handlers). The larger and more popular class is the character balloons, primarily consisting of licensed pop-culture characters; each of these (16 in 2019) is handled by exactly 90 people. From 2005 to 2012, a third balloon class, the "Blue Sky Gallery", transformed the works of contemporary artists into full-size balloons; after a five-year hiatus, the Blue Sky Gallery returned in 2018.

Balloons listed by year introduced

Character balloons

Novelty balloons

Blue Sky Gallery

Falloon

A falloon, a portmanteau

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