The year 1924 witnessed the first annual Macy’s Christmas Parade (the following year the name would change to its current “Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade”). This was the same year that the store’s 7th street expansion was completed, increasing its square footage to over one million and earning it the title of “World’s Largest Store.”

Popular myth has it that the parade stemmed from immigrant employees’ desire to celebrate their new American heritage in a parade reminiscent of European traditions.[1]

In reality, however, the interest of promoting the company and its stores prompted the then president and vice president, Jesse and Percy Straus, to make arrangements for Macy’s first parade. The Straus brothers “kept the carnival aspect of the older ragamuffin tradition but took complete managerial control over who or what marched, thereby preventing the parade from becoming spontaneous or democratic . . . this parade was to stand for ‘consumptionism,’ not for traditions invoking poverty or ethnic heritage.”[2] Though employees happily participated in the staging of it, contrary to popular belief, the organization of the first parade was the province of company executives, not immigrant employees.

Features of the first parade in 1924 included marching bands, clowns, horse-drawn floats depicting popular fairytales, live animals from the Central Park Zoo, and of course, Santa. Live animals were exhibited in the parade until 1927 when, in consideration of frightened children, they were replaced by Tony Sarg’s first giant balloon characters: Felix the Cat, the Dragon, the Elephant, and the