Thursday, November 25, 2021
What is the history behind the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade?
www.usatoday.com: The classic Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade has been watched by millions of New York residents and millions more on television.
After an audience-free parade in 2020, Will Coss parade executive said this years parade is returning as a celebration of "culture, love and spectacle."
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I can not believe that the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has been going on for 98 years. I didn’t realize that it was that old. I love that there is documentation of the very first floats in 1924. I do wonder when they actually changed it from a Christmas parade to the Thanksgiving Parade. I wonder if it was just where it was placed in the calendar. I think that even though it known by the new name, it still does the job of encouraging people to shop for the Hollidays. I mean, they close it with Santa every year now. I am not sure if I am surprised or not to hear that they are returning to running the parade as “normal”. The article didn’t list anything that they are doing for Covid Safety precautions. I think that the event taking place outside is helpful though. I do hope to be able to go in person one day.
The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is really an incredible tradition. It is so crazy to think that this has been happening for almost 100 years now! I had the honor of being able to perform in the parade my senior year of high school. It was actually a pretty insane experience. We left my town in Connecticut at around midnight the day of the parade, did a dry run of the parade at 3am, had breakfast at the Hard Rock Cafe at around 4:30-5:00 and then stepped off for the parade at 9am after a couple of hours of sleep on the bus in between. The parade is really run like a very regimented production with the dry run at 3am to get down all of the camera angles and such in Herald Square. It is always so impressive to see the work and planning that goes into making these beautiful floats and that goes into the actual logistics of how the parade operates. I am impressed with it every year and I was so glad to watch it again this year after a particularly weird one last year during the worst parts of the pandemic.
It’s a little bit odd that most of the information was cited from history.com and considering how short the article is It doesn’t seem like they actually did any research. The other very interesting thing was that they specifically mentioned how the only times it was cancelled was for three years during world war II and for one year during the pandemic. Which really puts into perspective how much this pandemic is going to be remembered and go down in history. There will be books and movies and historians that specialize in this specific event that we’re living through. I also liked the tidbit about how they donated that rubber from the balloons to help the war drive so they more or less had to start over building the balloons after the war push was over. I’m curious to know if the balloons are still made of rubber (but I’m guessing not.)
I’ve known that the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has been happening for a while now, but I had no idea that it’s nearing 100 years. I’ve never liked thanksgiving, but the parade as always been fairly interesting to watch. Especially seeing all of the floats, costumes, and various performances. It’s pretty crazy how far it’s come from what it was back in 1924, since nowadays all of the floats seem so complex and animated. I think it would be pretty fun getting to work on building one of the floats for the event. They said that the parade came back this year (I didn’t watch it), but I wonder if they did anything about covid safety at the event? Of course cases are dropping and more and more people are vaccinated, but that doesn’t really change the fact that there are still vulnerable and dying people. Being outside definitely helps to mitigate the risk but it’s still a possibility.
I don’t think I’d every stopped to wonder about the origins of the parade, other than to just think of it as ‘an old tradition’, so this was interesting to read I think it’s actually kind of fun that the parade actually began as a Macy’s advertisement, as opposed to something that had started as a public celebration that Macy’s then later slapped their name on. (Like stadiums, where they started with normal names and then brands paid a lot of money to get their name associated with it, which annoys me so much). I enjoy watching the parade as part of the Thanksgiving experience, and the logistics of putting it on and getting everyone where they need to go are fascinating to me. I agree with other commenters here that the fact that it’s only been cancelled for world wars and for covid really cemented how much of a historical time we’re living in - I think we’d all like to stop living through historical moments for a while, but it’s definitely interesting to think about.
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