An AWC to give thanks for: Macy’s held its first Thanksgiving Day parade on this day 90 years ago. A much more scaled-down predecessor to today’s event, its performers were Macy’s employees, many immigrants with a history of similar European festivals. Dressed as clowns and cowboys, or waving from floats featuring nursery rhyme characters, they marched six miles from Harlem to Macy’s massive Herald Square retail outlet along 34th Street as a quarter-million people packed the streets to watch on November 27, 1924.

While held on Thanksgiving Day, Macy’s actually called the first procession a Christmas parade. It was designed to officially welcome Santa Claus to New York (and more importantly, to welcome holiday shoppers to Macy’s, the “World’s Largest Store” with a million feet of retail space between Broadway and Seventh Avenue). At the end of the parade, Santa climbed onto a golden throne above the Macy’s marquee and unveiled an elaborate window display with Mother Goose characters carrying out their own parade as kids jostled to get a closer look. This mashup between two holidays is still part of the parade, so anyone complaining about how Christmas encroaches on Thanksgiving’s turf can thank Macy’s!

The first Macy’s parade didn’t have any character balloons. Instead, live animals on loan from the Central Park Zoo covered the route. This wasn’t a great idea. The bears, monkeys, and elephants became tired and cranky, and their growls scared kids along the parade route. The animals were removed from future parades, and in 1927, a helium-filled Felix the Cat was introduced to make up for their absence. The balloons kept coming in later parades: Mickey Mouse, the Marx Brothers, Superman, Popeye, and on and on…right up to the Spongebob, Shrek, and Pokemon inflatables that have joined the parade in the last decade.

The parade expanded in popularity throughout the 1930s, gaining a live audience of over a million. After going dark from 1942-1944 to conserve helium and rubber for the war effort, the parade returned in 1945. In 1947, it became famous on a much bigger scale thanks to its role in “Miracle on 34th Street.” In 1948, it made the jump from local TV stations and was broadcast on the brand-new medium of network television for the first time. Broadcasts of the parade typically pull in about 44 million people a year today.

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