What We Do While the Big Bird Bakes

by Pa Rock

Distant Cousin

(Note :  Much of the background for today's posting comes from material that was recently sent out by Newspapers.com to try and coax former subscribers to their service, like me, to renew lapsed memberships.  Newspapers.com is either owned by, or connected to, Ancestry.com and is one of their many very useful genealogy services that can be accessed for an extra fee.   Some US libraries also provide the subscription service free to their users.  Articles found through Newspapers.com are very easy to transfer to a person's family tree on Ancestry.com, and I found many of the more interesting tidbits in my own family tree through that service.)

The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade began one century ago yesterday on November 27, 1924 - which was Thanksgiving Day that year.  It was originally called the Macy's Christmas Parade and was designed as a commercial activity to promote holiday sales and to welcome Santa to New York.  The parade ended at the flagship Macy's Department Store on Herald Square where enormous windows decorated for the holidays were on display.

Most of the people involved in the earliest Macy parades were store employees, but it was also populated with brass bands, bareback riders, clowns, and wild animals from the Central Park Zoo.  The parade featured lavish holiday floats based on nursery rhymes, and Santa would arrive on board the most elaborate of the floats.

The name of the parade was changed to Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade three years later in 1927.  That was also the year that the parade's organizers quit using wild animals in their event and instead began featuring large animal balloons as parade highlights.   The first character balloon to float above the parade was Felix the Cat.  The original balloons used hot air instead of helium, and when the parade was over, they were released.  People who found and returned the balloons were rewarded with a prize.

The practice of releasing and then chasing down the balloons came to an end in 1932 when a 22-year-old student pilot (referred to in the press as a "girl") intentionally flew her plane into one of the balloons at 5,000 feet, apparently hoping to force it down but instead getting one of the plane's wings caught up in the balloon.  The plane was in a nosedive when the supervising pilot somehow managed to get it free of the balloon.

The parade was cancelled from 1942 through 1944 because of World War II.  Helium and rubber were both in short supply and needed by the military.  Macy's announced that the giant balloon characters had all enlisted in the war effort, and the store donated 650 pounds of rubber to the military.

New Yorkers were basically the main audience for the parade up until the late 1940's, but the film, "Miracle on 34th Street" which was released in 1947, changed all of that because it focused on Santa and his involvement in the parade.  Suddenly everyone was aware of the big Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City.  The following year the parade was televised for the first time, which brought even more interest - and from that point onward the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade was well on its way to becoming an annual holiday tradition across the nation.

It's what we do while the big bird bakes.