MACY'S THANKSGIVINGDAY PARADE

Many thanks to Mike Fontanelli for the tres cool pictures of past Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parades. Wow! How beautiful these balloons are! No wonder the parade attracted such big crowds. The gradual reveal of things like Pinocchio's enormous nose could only be appreciated by people who saw it in person. TV wouldn't have done it justice!

A magnificent crow (above), but who are the people who are carrying it? I like to think they're members of a secret society who just couldn't resist showing off their club's symbol.

Half the fun of any parade is watching people (above) in the crowd. I notice the kids in this picture are wearing the kind of clothes worn by the kids in the "Christmas Story" movie. My parents used to dress me like that. Only the cheeks were unprotected, and they froze like crazy!

Here's (above) Uncle Sam protecting everybody.

Unbelievable! Look at that crowd (above)! What if someone in there had to pee? How would he have done it?

A wild turkey takes flight (above). Look at those crazed eyes!

This (above) is indisputably the best Superman balloon ever to grace the parade!

People in those days (above) certainly had a taste for cartoon weirdness! Balloons today are too perfect, too middle of the road, too on-model.

I like how every parade ended with Santa, who was surrounded by dozens of beautiful women. Boy, Santa was the Hugh Hefner of his day!

When I was a kid nobody did any Christmas shopping til after Thanksgiving. Nobody tried to beat the crowds by shopping early, they just waited til the last minute then everybody shopped at the same time, shoulder to shoulder...what an ordeal!

Christmas shopping for us kids was easy. Mothers got quart bottles of cheap perfume or fuzzy slippers. Dads got ties. We kids really believed that they treasured those presents, and we devoted a lot of time to making sure that they used them.

My favorite thing to do was to visit the toy departments (above) in the big department stores. Sometimes they'd devote half of a whole floor to toys, and they were the kind of toys you couldn't get in your local neighborhood shops: chemistry sets, air rifles, Erector Sets, marionettes, space ships and space helmets, toy soldiers...what a feast! There was always a giant diorama showing all the top of the line toy trains weaving in and out of mountain tunnels and trestles. It was heaven for kids but hell for adults, who had to pry their crying kids unwilling fingers from toy shelves when it was time to go home.

Oh, well...enough nostalgia! Happy Thanksgiving everybody!!!!!!