Many of us tout the beginning of the Christmas season with an American institution known as Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. While Macy’s is not the oldest continuous parade, it is the most well-known even still today. Do you know how long this American tradition has been around?
The parade, originally referred to as Macy’s Christmas Parade, began in 1924 as a means to promote the holiday sales of Macy’s Department store in New York City. In the 1920s, many of Macy’s employees were first-generation immigrants who were proud of their new American heritage and wanted to celebrate the parade with the type of festival their parents had loved in Europe.
The first parade included employees and professional entertainers marching from Harlem to Macy’s flagship store on 34th Street, all dressed in vibrant costumes accompanied with floats and bands. At the end of that first parade, Santa Claus was welcomed into Herald Square. This parade proved so successful, with over 250,000 people in attendance, that Macy’s declared it would become an annual event.
The first large animal-shaped balloon of Felix the Cat made its debut in 1927. Macy’s used to always release the balloons into the sky at the end of the parade. Some of the balloons were designed with safety valves which allowed them to float in the sky for a few days. Address labels were sewn into those balloons, and when the balloons eventually deflated or popped, the person or persons who found where it landed were could mail it back in return for a gift from Macy’s.
At the time, department stores were extremely competitive, trying to top one another with marketing stunts and promotions in order to drive sales. The marketing gimmick to draw attention to Macy’s New York store proved successful with a quarter of a million people attending its inaugural parade, and growing to well over one million people lining the routes in the years following.
Here are some fun facts we will leave you with to think about while you chomp on your turkey leg and watch Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade 2011:
The parade, originally referred to as Macy’s Christmas Parade, began in 1924 as a means to promote the holiday sales of Macy’s Department store in New York City. In the 1920s, many of Macy’s employees were first-generation immigrants who were proud of their new American heritage and wanted to celebrate the parade with the type of festival their parents had loved in Europe.
The first parade included employees and professional entertainers marching from Harlem to Macy’s flagship store on 34th Street, all dressed in vibrant costumes accompanied with floats and bands. At the end of that first parade, Santa Claus was welcomed into Herald Square. This parade proved so successful, with over 250,000 people in attendance, that Macy’s declared it would become an annual event.
The first large animal-shaped balloon of Felix the Cat made its debut in 1927. Macy’s used to always release the balloons into the sky at the end of the parade. Some of the balloons were designed with safety valves which allowed them to float in the sky for a few days. Address labels were sewn into those balloons, and when the balloons eventually deflated or popped, the person or persons who found where it landed were could mail it back in return for a gift from Macy’s.
At the time, department stores were extremely competitive, trying to top one another with marketing stunts and promotions in order to drive sales. The marketing gimmick to draw attention to Macy’s New York store proved successful with a quarter of a million people attending its inaugural parade, and growing to well over one million people lining the routes in the years following.
Here are some fun facts we will leave you with to think about while you chomp on your turkey leg and watch Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade 2011:
- Bragging rights for the oldest Thanksgiving Parade does not exactly go to Macy’s. They really belong to what was known as the Gimbals’ Thanksgiving Day Parade in Philadelphia, which kicked off in 1920. The parade still exists and today is called the 6abc Philadelphia Thanksgiving Day Parade.
- Live animals accompanied floats from 1924 through 1926, loaned from the Central Park Zoo including lions, bears, camels and elephants. If you can imagine, due to the fright of many small children and obstacles presented from animal feces, the zoo animals were nixed in 1927, paving the way for the now famous balloon floats.
- The practice of offering gifts in return for the deflated oversized animal balloons came to an end in 1933 after a pilot nearly crashed his plane when attempting to capture a cat-shaped balloon.
- Macy’s is the world’s second largest consumer of helium and rubber next to the U.S. government. During World War II, there were rubber shortages — so many of the parade’s balloons were handed over to the U.S. military, providing more than 650 pounds of colorful scrap rubber to the war effort.
