Susanna Massa

Today, November 29, the Friday after Thanksgiving –aka Black Friday- is when the Christmas shopping season officially kicks off in the USA.

In recent years, most major retailers have opened extremely early and offered promotional sales and Black Friday shopping is known for attracting aggressive crowds, with annual reports of assaults, shootings, and throngs of people trampling on other shoppers in an attempt to get the best deal on a product before supplies run out.

Why call it Black Friday? Initially, it used to refer to the heavy pedestrian and vehicle traffic in Philadelphia on the day after Thanksgiving, but another definition has been given recently: retailers traditionally operate at a financial loss (“in the red”) from January through November, and “Black Friday” indicates the point at which retailers begin to turn a profit, or “in the black”.

Whether this is true or not, apart from the shopping frenzy of the day, what most people would never miss is Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade in New York.

Macy’s Parade started in 1924 on Christmas Day. Macy’s employees themselves dressed as clowns, cowboys and all sorts of costumes to draw attention to the store. Over 250,000 people attended that parade, and that’s how it became an annual event in Manhattan. The parade was suspended from the years 1942 to 1944 and resumed in 1945 along the same parade route until the year 2008. The parade became a more permanent part of American culture when it was featured in the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street.

It’s a 3-hour event that starts at 9 AM on Thanksgiving Day in New York City and ends with Santa‘s arrival as he closes out the parade.

Many people, when they think of the Macy’s parade, think of balloons. The first balloon, Felix the Cat, appeared in 1927. Soon after, he was inflated with helium – and without a proper way to deflate the balloon that first year, they let Felix fly off into the sky. Balloons are one of the most popular attractions of the parade, and kids have seen all their favorites come through in balloon form, like this year’s SpongeBob.