Throughout the year, New York surprises its residents and visitors with many parades and processions. And the most anticipated and contested of them is undoubtedly the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (the largest department store in the world), which takes place every 4th Thursday of November.
The Thanksgiving Day, known in English as Thanksgiving Day, is a holiday celebrated in the USA and Canada as a day of gratitude for the good events that occurred during the year. On this day, people give thanks with parties and prayers at family lunches.
Originally known as Macy’s Christmas Parade, the tradition was started by employees in 1924. The spirit of this small group of employees remains to this day, now involving more than 8,000 volunteers.
The parade is watched by over 3.5 million people in NY and by a nationwide television audience estimated at 50 million people.
The parade starts at 9 AM, on 77th Street, west side, continues down 6th Avenue towards Herald Square and 34th Street.
On the afternoon before the parade, the floats are inflated outside the American Museum of Natural History, between 77th and 81st Streets, starting at 1 PM.
Ancient History
In 1924, store employees paraded to the Macy’s 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 the first parade, Santa Claus was welcomed at Herald Square. In this first parade, Santa went to the Macy’s balcony at the store entrance, where he was crowned “King of the Children.” With an audience of over 250,000 people, the parade was such a success that the event became annual.
Anthony “Tony” Frederick Sarg worked with puppets and moved from London to New York to perform with his puppets on the streets. Macy’s heard about his talents and asked him to design a parade window display for the store.
Growth and Changes
During the 1930s, crowds of over a million people lined 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 starting in 1932.
The parade was suspended from 1942 to 1944 due to World War II, as the rubber and helium used in the balloons and puppets were needed for the war. The parade resumed in 1945 and became nationally known after being featured in the 1947 film, Miracle on 34th Street. The event had its first network television broadcast in 1948.
Since 1985, the parade has traditionally been led by the New York Police Department. In 2019, the cast of Sesame Street led the parade in honor of the show’s 50th anniversary.
After an incident in 2005, where a balloon knocked down a light pole and injured spectators, new safety measures were incorporated. One of these was the installation of wind measurement devices to alert about any unsafe conditions that could cause the balloons to behave erratically. Additionally, a measure was implemented to keep the balloons closer to the ground during windy conditions.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 parade was scaled down and closed to the public – filmed only for television broadcast. The balloons were tethered to a “vehicle anchor structure specially equipped with five special vehicles,” instead of being carried by handlers. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade returned in 2021 to its traditional in-person procession.
The 2022 edition marks the first time the parade was presented entirely by women.
Balloon
The balloons were introduced in 1927, replacing live zoo animals. Sarg’s large animal-shaped balloons were produced from 1920 to 1980. That year there was no procedure for deflating the balloons, and they were simply released. In 1928, five of the giant balloons were filled with helium to rise above 610 meters and slowly deflate for those lucky enough to catch the competitors in Macy’s “balloon race” and return them for a reward of $100, which lasted until 1932.
The balloons have had various varieties. The oldest is the class of innovative balloons, consisting of smaller balloons handled by one or more people (the smaller balloons are shaped like human heads and fit on the handlers’ heads). The larger and more popular class is the character balloons, mainly consisting of pop culture characters; each one is managed by exactly 90 people. From 2005 to 2012, a third group of balloons, the “Blue Sky Gallery,” transformed works by contemporary artists into life-sized balloons.
In addition to the well-known balloons and floats, the parade also features live music and other performances. Marching bands from colleges and schools across the country participate in the parade. The Rockettes from Radio City Music Hall are a classic performance, having performed annually since 1957, along with cheerleaders and dancers selected by the National Cheerleaders Association from various high schools across the country. The parade always ends with the arrival of Santa Claus to celebrate Christmas and the holiday season (except in the 1932 parade, when Santa led the parade). Since 2017, Macy’s Singing Christmas Tree choir precedes Santa as the last performer in the parade.
Special Guests
For the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Macy’s invited families of Tuesday’s Children (a nonprofit organization that benefits families directly affected by terrorism) to cut the ribbon at the start of the parade.
Television Coverage
More than 44 million people typically watch the parade on television each year. The parade was first televised locally in 1939 as an experimental broadcast on NBC’s W2XBS.
No television station broadcast the parade in 1940 or 1941, but local broadcasts resumed when the parade returned in 1945, after the wartime suspension.
NBC has been the official broadcaster of the event since 1953. However, CBS (which has a studio in Times Square) also provides unauthorized coverage.
The parade committee can support an official broadcaster since the parade occurs in public, but it cannot grant exclusive rights, as other events, such as sporting events, that take place in restricted-access stadiums have the authority to broadcast.
Since 2003, it has been broadcast to the Spanish community by Telemundo.
The parade has won nine Emmy Awards for outstanding achievements in special event coverage since 1979.
Since 2020, the parade has also provided audio description through a second audio program channel.
Black Friday
Black Friday is a colloquial term for the Friday after Thanksgiving Day in the USA. Traditionally, it marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Many stores offer sales at discounted prices and generally open early, sometimes even at midnight or on Thanksgiving Day itself. Sales from some stores continue until the following Monday (“Cyber Monday”) or for a week (“Cyber Week”).
Etymology
For centuries, the adjective “black” has been applied to days when calamities occurred. Many events have been described as “Black Friday,” although the most significant event in American history was the Panic of 1869, which occurred when financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk leveraged their connections with the Grant Administration in an attempt to corner the gold market. When President Grant learned of this manipulation, he ordered the Treasury to release a large supply of gold, which interrupted the run and caused prices to drop by 18%. Fortunes were made and lost in a single day, and the president’s own brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, was ruined.
The first known use of “Black Friday” to refer to the day after Thanksgiving occurred in the magazine Factory Management and Maintenance in 1951. Here it refers to the practice of workers calling in sick the day after Thanksgiving to have a four-day weekend. Around the same time, the terms “Black Friday” and “Black Saturday” began to be used by police in Philadelphia and Rochester to describe the crowds and traffic jams accompanying the start of the Christmas shopping season.
The use of the phrase spread slowly, first appearing in The New York Times in 1975.
As the phrase gained national attention in the early 1980s, merchants opposed to using an ironic term to refer to one of the most important shopping days of the year suggested an alternative derivation: that retailers traditionally operated at a financial loss for most of the year, January to November, and made a profit during the holiday season, starting the day after Thanksgiving. When this was recorded in financial records, once-common accounting practices used red ink to show negative values and black ink to show positive values. Black Friday, according to this theory, is the beginning of the period when retailers would no longer be “in the red.”
Black Friday is not an official holiday in the United States, but California and some other states observe “The Day After Thanksgiving” as a holiday for state government employees. It is sometimes observed instead of another federal holiday, such as Columbus Day. Many non-retail employees and schools have off on Thanksgiving Day and the following Friday. Along with the following regular weekend, this makes the Black Friday weekend a four-day weekend, which increases the number of potential shoppers.
Cyber Monday
Cyber Monday is a marketing term for e-commerce transactions on the Monday after Thanksgiving Day in the United States. It was created by retailers to encourage people to shop online. The term was coined based on a 2004 survey showing that “one of the biggest online shopping days of the year” was the Monday after Thanksgiving (the 12th largest day historically). Cyber Monday occurs on the Monday after Thanksgiving.
The name Cyber Monday arose from the observation that millions of productive American workers, just coming off a Thanksgiving weekend of window shopping, were returning to high-speed Internet connections at work on Monday and buying what they liked.