Thanksgiving to me has always meant the smell of cooking and the crackling sound of football - family gatherings and overeating. It's also meant waking up to the sounds of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. In my opinion, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is the best parade in the world. Not only do you have the standard marching bands and floats - you have dancers and balloons AND (this is the best part) - Broadway shows performed right in front of you! It's a glorious mix of music and dance and spectacle. While I'm not a big parade-goer in my everyday life, this year I was thrilled to be able to go to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade for the first time. I started talking about it in August.
Most New Yorkers were a little blase about the parade. They had seen the floats and balloons before and many complained about the cold weather or the fact that their parents had dragged them year after year against their will. Their childhood memories of the parade were quite a bit different from my own. I was undeterred by their stories, however. I was still anxious to see the parade for the first time. I even put off a trip to North Carolina to visit my mother by a day - just so I could witness the spectacle.
The night before the parade, I invited some friends to my neighborhood (yes - that's not a type-o - something was actually happening in my neighborhood....amazing) to see the balloons blown up outside the Natural History Museum. One by one my friends bagged out on me, but I took puppy in the early evening to see the balloons anyway. The crowd was dense with strollers and screaming kids, but the balloons were pretty amazing. They lined them up, shoulder to shoulder on either side of the museum and slowly started to fill them with helium. As they started to grow, the balloons took shape and really seemed like they were coming to life. It was like watching a flower bloom in quicktime - and at six stories high it was a really big flower. The crowds however, were not amazing and puppy didn't care too much about the balloons, so we didn't stay long.
The next morning I woke up at 6:00 to take puppy back to the scene. We made our way first down Columbus Avenue where bus after bus rumbled down the center of the street carrying parade participants. These were the balloon handlers, the dressers, and the dancers of the parade and 100% of them were in costumes. The buses seemed to be pre-organized, so each bus carried a group of around 100 people with the same outfit. A bus would stop and 100 people dressed in bright blue jumpers would file out (not unlike a prison movie). The bus behind it would stop and 100 people dressed like Harry Potter would file out. The next bus would stop and 100 people dressed like oversized leaves would file out. If you were on any kind of prescription medication and unaware of the parade later that morning - this would be a truly trippy experience.
The balloons were still on either side of the museum, but were now tied down, like something out of Gulliver's Travels.
I made my way past the museum and over to Central Park West where every single float in the parade was lined up - tip to tip - for over 12 blocks. It was incredible. You could walk up an touch these floats with their bright, beautiful colors and eclectic themes. There was a float shaped like a boat, a float shaped like New York City, a float shaped like a giant teacup with bears around it and of course, the last float with a giant hill, an oversized sleigh and eight life-sized reindeer - waiting for Santa. I felt like a kid in a toy store. I don't think my mouth closed all morning.
I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, so I decided to head home with puppy before the parade and take a quick nap. On my way home, I saw the marching bands starting to file in. On 86th and 85th street, rows and rows of marching bands were walking down - taking up the entire street with waves of bright colors and musical instruments. They filed down the street and towards the back of the floats to await their next instruction. It looked like an ocean of marching band members - it was amazing.
After my nap I made my way back to the museum where I set up right before the starting line. The crowd was dense, but nowhere near as crazy as the night before. I'm sure there are areas of the city where it gets super packed, but where I was people were pretty mellow and everyone could see the action.
The balloons were much more impressive as they were carried down the streets by handlers. Now they no longer seemed like oversized toys - but like toys that had come to life. They were huge - overwhelming. When they floated by, they would block out the sun for several moments.
The floats were also more impressive in movement. Now they were accompanied by dancers and music and the occasion pop super star (hello Kayne!). The dancers were lovely and the marching bands - well, the marching bands kind of just sounded like marching bands - but they were from all over the country and seemed very excited to be there.
I had a tremendous amount of excitement leading up to the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade. Local New Yorkers tried to downplay the magic of they day, but I wouldn't be deterred. And I was right not to. The parade exceeded my heightened anticipations - and was one of the most magical things I've witnessed so far in New York. I absolutely loved it.
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