The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Holiday Tradition for Impoverished American Children that it Replaced


 The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade took place exactly one-hundred years ago in 1924.  And just like today’s annual holiday spectacle, this first incarnation of the iconic Thanksgiving Day Parade, marched straight down 34th Street in midtown Manhattan and ended outside of Macy’s flagship department store at Herald Square.     However, unlike today’s parade that is full of marching bands, celebrities, broadway dancers and larger than life inflatable balloons and ornate floats--that first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was composed entirely of Macy’s employees….and Santa of course!  But even the big guy in the red suit played a slightly different role in that first parade than he does today.  Rather than riding through midtown at the head of  a reindeer driven sleigh and waving at the throngs of onlookers who line the parade route, the Santa Claus of 1924 sat in a stately throne, was crowned “King of the Kiddies” by his elves (which sounds vaguely creepy) at the end of the parade and then waved to the crowd from a second floor balcony attached to the Macy’s store itself.

Baruch College of New York City says on its website in an article entitled “Uniquely NYC: Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade” at https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/uniquely_nyc/macys-thanksgiving.htm  that, “In the 1920’s a lot of Macy’s employees were first generation European immigrants.  They wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving Day with the kind of festival that they loved and cherished back home.”  The same article then goes on to mention that Macy’s employees on Thanksgiving Day 1924 marched down 34th Street dressed as, “Clowns, cowboys, knights and sheiks.”  In this first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade there were even twenty-five live animals that were borrowed for the event from the Central Park Zoo as seen by the elephants pictured at the top of this article!  

Children watch the Parade 1930's

Well, whether the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was born as a way for first generation immigrants to take part in the uniquely American holiday of Thanksgiving, or whether it was simply a publicity stunt backed by and financed with money from the lucrative Macy’s Department Store chain as a way to boost its holiday gift sales, or whether it was a combination of the two, is debatable.  However, one thing is certain.  The first edition of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade one hundred years ago way back in 1924 was a big hit and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has remained a treasured Thanksgiving tradition for millions of Americans ever since.

Macy's Herald Square  ca. 1930

The first balloon, Felix the Cat by the way, was introduced in 1927 a mere three years after the parade got its start.  Since watching the parade was, and still is free, it is estimated that during the height of the Great Depression on Thanksgiving Day 1934 over one million people lined the streets of midtown just to witness the spectacle firsthand.  It was also at this time, in the mid 1930’s , that the Parade became one of the first events to be broadcast live to the entire nation via radio.

The history and lore of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is rather well known and in fact much of it is retold each year as the Parade is broadcast live each Thanksgiving morning on network television to millions and millions of Americans.  But what most people don’t know is that the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is not the first of its kind, nor the longest continually running annual Thanksgiving Parade of its kind in the United States--that honor belongs to the city of Philadelphia where the annual Thanksgiving Day Parade dates all the way back to 1920 and beats the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade by a mere four years!  Apparently, the people of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania love their holiday parades because as covered by Creative History in August of 2023, the City of Brotherly Love is also home to America’s oldest Fourth of July Independence Day Parade, which you can read about here: 


https://creativehistorystories.blogspot.com/2023/08/a-spontaneous-demonstration-of-joy-with.html


But all kidding about Philadelphia and its fetish for parades aside, there is one sad by-product of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and the way it changed American history forever!

Felix the Cat the First Balloon

The popularity of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and other annual Thanksgiving Day Parades across America like specifically those in Philadelphia and Detroit that began to pop up across the country during the 1920’s forever replaced the kid friendly, slightly mischievous and somewhat raucous local tradition of “Ragamuffin Day” and its consequent parade on Thanksgiving morning.

For over fifty years from approximately the end of the American Civil War in 1865 when Thanksgiving itself which once had been a uniquely New England tradition began to take hold thanks to a decree by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 as a national holiday until the 1920’s, Thanksgiving Day morning had been considered a “Ragamuffin Day” for most of America’s small children.  “Ragamuffin Days” consisted of an activity akin to trick-or-treating, or perhaps more like outright begging since in its original incarnation kids didn’t wear costumes, they simply went door to door and asked for treats, good things to eat or toys.  

In New York City and other metropolitan areas across the United States on “Ragamuffin Day” Thanksgiving morning, children would dress in rags, or pretend to be homeless regardless of their family’s economic standing and go door to door pestering the more well-to-do citizens of their cities and towns for treats, toys and food.  For many urban children in the late 19th and early 20th century, specifically immigrant or working class children of the time, “Ragamuffin Days” or “Beggars Days” as some called them that corresponded with major American holidays like Thanksgiving, must have been not only thrilling times, but also, practically necessary for their survival given their harsh subsistence living conditions. 


With the advent of Thanksgiving Day parades in the 1920’s followed by the economically devastating onset of the Great Depression in 1929, Ragamuffin Day began to fall out of fashion.  Wikipedia, in its article about the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade states when mentioning Ragamuffin Day that, “The public backlash against such begging in the 1930’s (when most Americans were struggling in the midst of the Great Depression) led to the promotion of alternatives including the Macy’s Parade.”

Apparently, the “Ragamuffins” wouldn’t go quietly into the Thanksgiving night and during the 1930’s and 40’s there were competing “Ragamuffin Parades” held in New York City each Thanksgiving Day morning, without the begging and without the beggars rags and presumably with the children dressed in costume, but alas!  Eventually, the strength and popularity of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade proved too much and by the end of the Second World War even Ragamuffin Parades had been moved almost exclusively to Halloween and to the month of October where they have remained in America ever since.  

 

Victorian Era postcard depicting a Holiday "Ragamuffin"

The last Thanksgiving Day Ragamuffin Parade would take place in New York City in 1956 and a Thanksgiving Day tradition that had been born in the wake of the American Civil War nearly one hundred years prior would finally be erased from the pages of history once and for all.  Let’s hope that one day another, even more materialistic and less kid friendly Thanksgiving Day tradition doesn’t come along and replace the iconic Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

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