The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade happens every Thanksgiving starting at 9 a.m EST and ending at noon. The parade features all sorts of things from fictional characters, mascots, celebrities and marching bands. 

The first Macy’s parade happened on Nov 27, 1923 in New York City. The parade was held was to promote sales for the holiday season. This is why Santa Claus is the final balloon in the parade, to promote the start of the holiday season. It should be noted that the Macy’s parade was not the first of it’s kind held on Thanksgiving. It was not the first big parade in New York, nor was it the first in an American city. Those titles would go to the New York’s Ragamuffin parade and Gimbels Thanksgiving Day Parade in Philadelphia. The latter was what the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was likely inspired by, while the former was an old form of trick-or-treating.

While the Ragamuffin parade is still being held at the same time, they were pushed out of Manhattan by the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and Halloween in the 1930s after the Great Depression. As for why Ragamuffin parades came to be, the holiday was originally formed as a way to celebrate Thanksgiving in New York, a few years after it became a national holiday under Abraham Lincoln in 1863.

Before Lincoln, the Holiday was always stuck in a weird spot. Not every president before him celebrated or even acknowledged the holiday. Another interesting thing is that Thanksgiving till Lincoln never had a defined date, for example Washington set his celebration of Thanksgiving in February 19, 1795. This was due to the fact that Thanksgiving at this time didn’t have a set time yet as all It was an evolution of the ancient tradition of a harvest festival, celebration of a successful harvest. For this reason the story of the Pilgrims was nowhere near as integral to the celebration of thanksgiving as they are today. 

The Pilgrims only started to become know during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this time, massive amounts of immigrants were coming to the United States in search of jobs and at the same time schools were trying to integrate lessons about national holidays into their lessons. The story of the Pilgrims became a perfect match for the times; It was about a popular US holiday and gave a narrative about a country that was welcoming to immigrants.

Overall, Thanksgiving, unlike most other US Holidays, doesn’t actually have a clear cut origin and stems from a much older tradition of harvest festivals leading to a massive variety of how the holiday is celebrated and what it is celebrating.