An annual parade held in New York City and presented by the Macy's department store chain. It got its start in 1924; it's tied for second-oldest parade in America, with Detroit's America's Thanksgiving Parade. Philadelphia's Thanksgiving Day Parade is four years older than both of them.
All parades are hell. And the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is even worse.
The first parade in 1924 featured store employees marching to Macy's Herald Square, which was the chain's flagship location. They also had floats and marching bands, as well as live animals from the Central Park Zoo. Santa Claus made his appearance at the end, marking the official beginning of the holiday shopping season. Over a quarter of a million people watched, and the department store decided the parade would be an annual event.
The first large balloons -- a group of generic animals -- appeared in the 1928 parade, and the next year's parade featured the first recognizable character balloons -- characters from the "Barney Google" and "Katzenjammer Kids" comic strips -- appeared the next year. The parade grew more popular during the 1930s, attracting crowds of over a million people, but it was suspended during World War II, as rubber and helium were in demand for the war effort. Soon after it resumed in 1945, the parade got its biggest boost ever, thanks to the 1947 movie "Miracle on 34th Street," which featured the parade as a major plot point, along with footage of the previous year's parade.
The parade was covered on local radio beginning in 1932, and it was televised for the first time in 1948. There's usually a celebrity host to provide parade play-by-play for home audiences -- in recent decades, that's usually some poor schmuck from the Today show.
The giant balloons have always been a big part of the parade, and that's entirely because of nostalgia. The fact is, the balloons are hard to handle for the crews assigned to march them down the parade route, and they can also be dangerous, as balloons damaging lampposts and dropping debris on crowds or even flying out of control isn't at all uncommon. The balloons are especially dangerous on very windy days -- and with all those skyscrapers lining the parade route, it's always windy in NYC. Parade organizers and city officials are always trying to make the balloons safer -- making the balloons smaller, taking off lamppost arms before the parade, more training for balloon handlers, flying the balloons lower when it's windy -- but there are limits to how safe you can make giant floating balloons. They probably ought to permanently remove them from the parade, but they make a big spectacle, and the nostalgia factor is really high, too -- so no matter how unsafe they may be, they'll probably never get rid of the damn things.
The balloons were actually more unsafe in the early days of the parade. Back in the '20s, there was no procedure to deflate balloons, so when the parade was over, they'd just let them go. Later, they were designed to rise above 2,000 feet when the parade was over and slowly deflate -- there was actually a contest for people to retrieve the deflated balloons and bring them back, for a $100 prize.
The parade always features a variety of marching bands, along with musical performers -- generally established superstars, pop musicians getting their first (and often last) chance at fame, and singers and dancers from Broadway musicals.
I know people who love this parade. They tune in every Thanksgiving morning and watch it all the way through, thrilling to every Minion balloon, to every singing-and-dancing Mickey Mouse float, to every spinning tribute to the rotting corpse of capitalism, to every tipsy morning show host, to every teenaged pop star who knows if this overproduced Christmas pop song doesn't get Mariah Carey levels of airplay, she's going to have to go back home to Webb City and pray getting a job slinging hash at the Chat and Chew won't be too humiliating to survive. But there's gotta be something wrong in your head to actually enjoy it.
All parades are hell. And the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is even worse.