The Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade has been a staple each year since 1924. Although it started as a way to get people excited about the store and the first parade was actually at Christmas rather than Thanksgiving, whatever they did worked as today over 3.5 million attend annually and another 50 million watch from the comfort of their living rooms.
Over the years some things about the parade have changed; the route, the participants and of course the balloons. Back in 1927 Felix the Cat became the first balloon ever to be part of the fun. The following year they decided to fill it with helium but didn’t have a way to deflate it, so they just let it go. It popped. In subsequent years they let balloons go as well, still having no way to deflate them. They addressed them all and if you found one you could take it back to Macy’s for a prize, not that many people did however.
The parade has always been very well attended. The first one ever had 250,000 people lining the six mile route that took the store employees from Herald Square to Harlem. It has been something Americans look forward to each year, and of course over the years it has grown. There were only a few years where there was no Macy’s Thanksgiving parade and that was while World War II was being fought and the rubber used to make the balloons was instead donated to the war effort. By 1945 however, there were two million people who lined the route, thankful the war was over and things could get back to normal.
Today some eight thousand people walk the route and it takes another four thousand people to volunteer to get the route, the floats and the balloons organized.
If you have never been to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day festivities why not go but do it in style by chartering a jet? You won’t have to battle the crowds at a commercial airport or suffer through the long lines at security checkpoints. You will have plenty of leg, head and shoulder room and best of all you can choose when and what time to fly. Your schedule, not theirs!
If you choose to charter you can land at an airport closer to the action, and get where you are going a heck of a lot quicker than you can flying commercial, and you may even get to watch the balloons being inflated, which happens the night before the big day.