Creative History

  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...

  During the 15th or 16th century, in Dublin, Ireland, there lived a drunkard whom everyone knew by the name of “Stingy” Jack.  Now, Jack was a well known alcoholic and a conman and many people in town flat out called him a liar.  It’s believed that his state of dissipation and dishonesty is what caused Jack to earn the nickname “Stingy” because if anyone either out of pity, or trickery, chose to trust Jack he would only let them down and thereby “sting” them either out of drink or simple negligence. Well, as the story goes, none other than the Devil himself found out about Stingy Jack’s reputation throughout Ireland.  Satan couldn’t believe that there could possibly be a drunken Irish Hell-raiser who was  worse than himself.  And so, one day it is reported, the Devil himself went down to Dublin to have a conversation with “Stingy” Jack. The night that the Devil came to talk with Jack, he was drunkenly stumbling around in the fields outside the city lim...

  November 30, 1876, Thanksgiving Day, is cold and wet in northern New Jersey.  Temperatures in Hoboken that early afternoon are near freezing, and an icy sleet is falling. About 1,000 fans have gathered outside on what is called the St. George’s Cricket Ground on this Thanksgiving Day to watch twenty-two collegiate athletes, eleven students from Princeton and eleven from Yale, faceoff in the first ever Thanksgiving Day American gridiron football game. Some sources say the game was played, like modern American football by teams of eleven-on-eleven, though others say that there may have been as many as fifteen players per side, but whatever the number, the game played on that cricket ground that day was unique enough to be considered something entirely different from other collegiate sports that were popular at the time such as rugby or soccer. Most who gathered at the local cricket grounds in Hoboken, New Jersey that day, were former alumni or simply curious spectators w...

  It is the Saturday after Thanksgiving off the New England coast.  November 26, 1898. The sea is calm and temperatures are seasonably cool and crisp.  Weather stations all along the eastern seaboard note nothing out of the ordinary that day except for one thing: the color of the sky.  The sky that evening is yellow.  It is glowing with an ominous and almost surreal luminescence as the sun begins to set. Sailing Master, Joseph Kemp, employed aboard a steamship in Boston Harbor noted that the yellow sky off the coast of Massachusetts on November 26, 1898 looked like, “The greasiest evening you ever saw.” On that “greasy” evening two low pressure fronts, one charging eastward from the Great Lakes, and the other, a warm weather system moving northward from the Gulf of Mexico are about to collide off the Massachusetts coast and create one of the most ferocious and destructive nor’easters in American history. Late 19th century forecasters know through baromet...