products, and adults are faced with the pressure of fulfilling such requests in order to make the holiday special and to keep children believing in Santa. Many Americans have come to asscoiate the holiday season with stress, both on time and finances, as they scramble to buy, wrap, return, and exchange. This current-day conception of Christmas is indicative of a significant change in holiday celebrations in the U.S. over time.
In recent years, the apparent disconnect between the modern form of holidays and their origins has been addressed by scholars studying the development of consumer culture in the U.S. This change has been traced back to the 1920's when new forms of leisure began usurping church activities in the lives of Americans. With the rise of spectator sports, amusement parks, and the cinema, new attractions began drawing people away from worship-related passtimes, undermining the traditional American Sabbath.[1]
As liesure became more secularized, the nature of celebration underwent significant changes as well. The leisure aspects of celebration began to significantly outweigh the religious aspects. This has helped to precipitate the secular nature of holidays we encounter today, which many Americans participate in with little regard to the holiday's religious foundings.[2]
The change in the way Americans celebrate opened the door to another important change: a new emphasis on holiday consumerism. This transformation coincided with a broader trend toward consumerism in mid-twentieth-century America. A new advertising industry, having been refined through WWII propaganda efforts, now began redefining many aspects of American life in terms of material purchases.[3] Holidays provided an ideal site for this practice. With holidays and celebration being defined largely in terms of enjoyment, marketers were able to link consumerism to beliefs about and expressions of the collective identity fostered through celebration.[4] The way Americans perceived holidays began to include high levels of consumerism. Put simply, with regard to Christmas, the point of the holiday became gift-giving rather than worship, and hence gift-purchasing became a cornerstone feature of Christmas celebration.
Macy's Parade is a prime illustration of this trend towards consumerism and commericalism in holidays. By virtue of its timing, the parade claims to celebrate two holidays, Christmas and Thanksgiving. Indeed, it seems to encompass the span of the "holiday season," beginning with a turkey balloon and ending with Santa. The parade conspicuously embraces the concept of holidays as a time for leisure and entertainment; its theme each year is "Entertainment for Children Everywhere."[5] It also prides itself in being a celebration of America. In truth though, the prevailing theme of the parade is advertising. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade began as a marketing ploy and has continued in this vein ever since.
When the parade first began, the tradition of Thanksgiving Day parading was already alive in the streets of New York. Ragamuffin parades, which harkened back to European traditions, were a chance for the poorer immigrants of New York to march through the streets in extravagant costumes, begging for change.[6]
Popular myth would have us believe that the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade originated in a similar fashion. Macy's itself supports the belief that its parade began as a spontaneous decision by immigrant store employees wishing to celebrate their newfound Americanness with a European-style parade. This portrait of the event's beginnings lends itself to a commercialism-free depiction of the parade.
Upon examining meeting minutes from 1924, however, scholar William Leach discovered that the idea for the parade came exclusively from store executives, not immigrant employees. The Straus Brothers, who ran the store at the time, had recently decided to increase the company's promotional endeavors, in particular those geared towards children. The parade was one major undertaking towards this goal. Many aspects of the parade were reminiscient of ragamuffin parading, but employees were not consulted in the decision to hold the event, and were, in fact, offered pay as incentive to march.[7] Likely, inspiration for the parade came less from the ragamuffin spectacles, and more from the promotional parades being held by other department stores, like Gimbels' Thanksgiving Day Parade in Philadelphia.
Despite being a marketing venture, in its early days the parade lacked much of the advertising it incorporates today. During the parade's first run, the Macy's name was only displayed once, and floats and other features were representative of fairy tales and folk-lore, not companies and products.[8] The earliest parades were therefore more indicative of the transition from holidays of worship to holidays of entertainment than of commercialism.
Long before commercialism enveloped the parade, though, this new emphasis on secular holiday leisure encountered objections as religious groups protested the parade on the basis that it drew crowds away from Thanksgiving morning church services.[9] In response to the protests, the parade was deferred to the afternoon, but this eventually conflicted with afternoon football games, an increasingly popular spectator pastime. Eventually, the American interest in entertainment won out over religious concerns, and the parade was gradually held earlier and earlier once more. The transformation in American holidays had truly become apparent.
As the American consumer culture developed, holidays continued to transform, and the parade proceeded to become a blatant celebration of the American will to buy.
One telling feature of the parade is the prominence of Santa Claus as the "king" of the spectacle. Santa, though he originated as Saint Nicholas, has since become a decidedly secular figure. More importantly, Santa has come to reign as the archetypal symbol of holiday marketing, as he stands for gift-giving and hence gift-purchasing. His presence is ubiquitous in American holiday ads, and has been for decades. Scholar William Leach addresses this marketing tactic in his discussion of what he terms "the cult of Santa."[10]
The prominence of Santa's image in holiday marketing and celebrations has drawn criticism from religious groups as well, as many Christians object to the emphasis being taken away from the birth of Christ. In a review of the book Christmas Unwrapped, religious journalist Joseph W. Williams notes a "religion of consumer capitalism" and states that "movies such as Miracle on 34th Street provide its mythology; Santa Claus serves as its chief icon; gift-giving and shopping supply its rituals."[11] Such a description indicates not only the source of Christian objections, but also provides a useful analogy for the new face of Christmas. Macy's parade certainly supports this new "religion" with its flaunting of Santa and its abundance of ads and promotions.
These ads and promotions are perhaps the most obvious feature of the modern parade. Today the event markets not only Macy's, but a wealth of other companies, from toymakers to food manufacturers to insurance firms. Floats and balloons are emblazoned with company names and insignias; broadcasters and commercial breaks turn the televised version into one long advertisement for products and entertainment. Furthermore, the very parade route traces a path to the entrance of Macy's, enticing customers inside with extravagant decorations and the promise of meeting Santa Claus.
This invitation to shop is fulfilled the day after Thanksgiving in an American phenomenom that has become known as Black Friday. This day is the biggest shopping day of the year, and retailers prepare for it weeks in advance by advertising their after-Thanksgiving Day sales. Customers typically line up outside stores hours before they open (and they often open exceptionally early on this day). Once the doors open, there are limited deals to be had, so the pressure is on customers to shop fast and in great quantity. In Macy's Herald Square alone, the number of visitors to come through the doors jumps from 35,000 a day to 75,000 on Black Friday. [12] For many, the day exists almost as a holiday unto itself, signifying the official start of the Christmas shopping season.
How the day after Thanksgiving came to be regarded as the start of the holiday season was one of our initial interests upon beginning our research. We were fascinated by the notion that the holiday season is kicked off by a marketing ploy (Macy's Parade). We had hoped to encounter some direct historical link between Thanksgiving Day parading and the emergence of the understanding that Thanksgiving marks the beginning of the Christmas season. Unfortunately, causal relationships are often ambiguous in history, and we were unable to locate any evidence that Christmas parading on Thanksgiving Day produced this mindest. We do not know whether the notion existed before the parades began, although no mention is made of this notion in accounts of the reasons Macy's considered in holding the parade on that day. The reasons mentioned include children being out of school and light traffic flow, but nothing of a pre-existing belief that the day marked the start of the Christmas season.[13]
Logic would lead us to speculate several things. One is that part of the reason for this starting date is simply the fact that Thanksgiving is the last holiday before Christmas. In modern times, it has become the practice to begin holiday sales as soon as (and recently, even before) the preceeding holiday passes, so as to maximize sales potentials. We would dearly love to know when and how this practice originated, but this is beyond the scope of our project. Secondly, whether or not Macy's Parade helped to establish this mindset (and we suspect that it did, at least in part), we would argue that it has successfully reinforced this mindset over time. The parade aptly takes advantage of the American impulse to begin shopping by feeding its audience suggestions and encouragement, and by creating an air of jubilant excitement about the prospect. If Americans believe it is time to shop, Macy's bolsters this belief wholeheartedly. And via the atmosphere of celebration surrounding the event, the parade promotes the message that shopping is an essential part of celebrating Christmas.
In a brief interview with CBS reporters during a broadcast of the 2005 Macy's Parade, NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg stated "Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, because it's not commercialized." As we hope our site helps to prove, nothing could be further from the truth. While one could argue that Thanksgiving itself is not commercialized through the parade nearly as much as Christmas is, it remains true that Thanksgiving Day hosts an extravaganza of holiday commercialization. Through cultural practices like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, holidays are packaged and sold to Americans.
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