The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade took place in 1924

Macy’s revolutionized retail with fixed pricing, pay-upfront policies, and marketing

The brand soon grew into a cultural icon, hosting the first in-store Santa in 1862, and launching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924, now a holiday staple. Its flagship Herald Square store became the world’s largest, and its festive window displays set a new standard for holiday celebrations.

Learn how the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade comes together each year

The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is essentially a huge theatrical production spanning several long blocks in New York City rather than a stage. Naturally, organizing it is a complicated process. This podcast episode explains how the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade comes together each year.

Explore a Macy's historical timeline

From its founding as RH Macy & Co. in 1858, to its 150th birthday in 2008, Macy’s has a long and storied history. Luckily, the store has chronicled many of its major milestones on its website, including key Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade milestones.

Watch a video that details the full history of Macy's

From the first Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade to opening its flagship store in Herald Square, Macy's has a long and successful history despite its recent financial troubles.

See historic Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade photos

Snoopy and Bullwinkle and Clifford, oh my! This slideshow has photographs of all those characters (and more) from when they debuted as balloons at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. These photos span from the original parades in the 1920s through the early 2000s.

In 1924, elephants from the Central Park Zoo marched in Macy's inaugural parade

Enormous balloons didn’t make an appearance until 1927, and the parade wasn’t televised until 1948. But no matter the decade, a visit from Santa Claus has always been a highlight.

In 1939, an industry group asked Franklin Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving

Specifically, the Retail Dry Goods Association warned Franklin Roosevelt that if the holiday season didn’t begin until after Americans celebrated Thanksgiving on the traditional final Thursday in November, retail sales would tank. In 1941 Congress passed a law that made Thanksgiving the fourth rather than the last Thursday in November.

Thanksgiving's connection to football began in 1876

It all started with a match between Princeton and Yale in 1876, attended by fewer than 1,000 fans. That competition spawned an annual tradition attracting millions of viewers across college and professional teams.

A Thanksgiving meal was celebrated in Virginia in 1619

Although the Pilgrims' meal with the Wampanoag is often cited as "the first Thanksgiving," historians note a meal intended to mark "a day of thanksgiving to Almighty god" was celebrated by early settlers three years earlier. President John F. Kennedy acknowledged the day in his 1963 Thanksgiving proclamation.

See Rockefeller Center's Christmas trees since 1931

In 1931, with construction still underway, Rockefeller Center's very first Christmas tree was erected out front. John D. Rockefeller himself greeted the construction workers who put up the first 20-foot tree and decorated it with cranberries and paper garland.

The first Boston Marathon was held the next year

In 1897, the manager of the US Olympic team organized the first Boston Marathon, which featured a field of 15 runners. The race took place on Patriots Day, a holiday commemorating the first battles of the American Revolution.

Throughout the 1980s, the Times Square ball was a giant apple

From 1981 to 1988, the sparkling ball was replaced by a “big apple” to promote the city’s “I Love New York” tourism campaign. This broadcast is from the apple’s first year, where one announcer proclaims, “It’s great! It’s beautiful!”

The Black Friday Archive collects Black Friday ads from the past 25 years

The archive features advertisements from notable retailers such as Bath & Body Works, Gap, and The Home Depot, among others. These ads span from the years 2000 to 2024, in addition to some from early holiday sales at Macy’s in 1963.

The traditional parade takes place on the first Sunday of the festival

The parade offers a peek into Oktoberfests of yesteryear, from the Münchner Kindl, a beautiful Munich native who opens the parade, to the Goaßlschnalzen, a float full of men cracking whips.

Every Thanksgiving, Americans eat over 40 million turkeys

That's 50% of all whole turkeys sold in the US in a given year. (Most of the remaining 50% are purchased for Christmas.)

The first recorded American Mardi Gras was in Alabama

French explorers observed celebrations in what would become the United States in the late 1600s, but the first recognized modern American Mardi Gras took place in Mobile, Alabama, on New Year's Eve, running from 1830 into 1831. By 1840, the town had incorporated costumes, masks, and themes into its parade. After the Civil War, Mobile's Mardi Gras was moved to the more traditional date of Fat Tuesday. By 1850, a group from Mobile migrated to New Orleans, bringing the city's traditions with it.

The history of Mother's Day in the US

Mother’s Day is a holiday honoring motherhood that is observed in different forms throughout the world. Learn about the origins of the official holiday in the US with this in-depth breakdown of the holiday, from the 19th-century women's movement to the commercialization of Mother's Day sales.

American Express created 'Small Business Saturday' in 2010

As small businesses across the US were still reeling from the Great Recession, American Express came up with the idea of "Small Business Saturday" to help drive consumer spending to small businesses. Small Business Saturday is the day after Black Friday. In 2011, the Senate passed a resolution supporting Small Business Saturday, and, since then, it's become nationally recognized.

Halloween originated with the Celtic festival of Samhain

Halloween, a holiday primarily popular in the US and Canada, originated 2,000 years ago with the Celtic people. The Celts interpreted this transition as when ghosts returned to the land of the living, leading to rituals like feasts, bonfires, and wearing costumes made of animal body parts on Oct. 31.

In 1924, the department store Marshall Field's invented the first modern 'wedding registry'

However, there were many traditions around wedding gifts before the wedding registry was invented, too—from dowries to marriage chests. Read about the history of the wedding registry in this article.

The massive gathering that rang in the first Earth Day

Earth Day was first celebrated in 1970 and helped inspire a significant nationwide environmental movement. In Philadelphia, the holiday was rung in with a gathering in the city’s Fairmount Park featuring musicians, speakers, and over 10,000 attendees. This video from CBS offers remarkable footage from the day and explains why Philadelphians were especially drawn to the environmental cause.

The first printed Advent calendars were from Germany in the early 1900s

Printed Advent calendars originated in early-20th-century Germany, where printer Gerhard Lang created the first commercially produced versions. Inspired by his mother’s homemade countdowns, Lang added small doors in the 1920s, establishing the format that spread worldwide.

Hanukkah wasn’t always a major Jewish holiday

In the 1800s, Jewish immigrants to the United States began searching for ways to maintain their cultural identity in an overwhelmingly Christian environment. Because Hanukkah often falls around the same time as Christmas, Jewish congregations began adapting Christmastime traditions like gift giving to their own holiday.

More than 5,000 marchers joined the 1913 Woman Suffrage Parade on the National Mall

On March 3, 1913—the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration—suffragists marched through Washington, DC. The parade drew large crowds, exposed violent opposition to women's suffrage, and helped galvanize support for the 19th Amendment.

Singles' Day was created as a response to Valentine's Day

Inspired by people feeling left out by Valentine's Day, the Chinese holiday celebrates the unattached. It takes place Nov. 11, sometimes referred to as "Double 11," and has become a major shopping day, with over $202B spent on that day in 2024.

After the Boston Tea Party, colonists switched to coffee, which became the main morning drink for revolutionaries.

The first horror movie is believed to be George Méliès' 1986 short 'The Haunted Castle,' which pioneered the use of special effects

Sears sold DIY house kits starting at $600 in its famous catalog from 1908 through the 1940s, resulting in roughly 10,000 'Sears and Roebuck houses' being built.

While the first exchange-traded fund (a 'basket' of different assets that can be bought and sold on a stock exchange) in the US only launched in 1993, the global ETF market has grown to more than $10T in the short time since.

The idea for the Federal Reserve was conceived in secret in 1910—with bankers donning duck hunt gear for disguise while traveling to a remote country club on Georgia's Jekyll Island

When a Paris department store hesitated to sell Estée Lauder's perfume, she 'accidentally' broke a bottle, causing the smell to spread throughout the store and shoppers to start asking to buy the scent.

Hear about the 250-year history of the United States Postal Service, complete with some of its strangest deliveries, important innovations, and the figures that made it an American institution.

Watch a 1934 short film starring jazz legend Cab Calloway, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance's music scene

American dance legend Martha Graham, sometimes called 'the Picasso of dance,' refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and conceived the piece 'Chronicle' in response to the experience.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

'Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,' a work by American painter Thomas Moran, inspired Congress to establish Yellowstone National Park.

11 people died from firework injuries in the US in 2024.

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

The power and influence of the American presidency have expanded significantly over time—far beyond what the founders envisioned.

For centuries, Niagara Falls has been a magnet for daredevils seeking to conquer one of nature's most powerful wonders, with its 200-foot drop and water rushing at 32 feet per second with 280 tons of force.

Domino's Pizza's 30-minute delivery guarantee was responsible for the chain's 1980s surge, but it was discontinued after the company was found liable for delivery driver accidents.

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

Take a 3D tour of the Hajj, Islam's annual pilgrimage to Mecca, undertaken by over 1.5 million Muslims.

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

Graffiti dates back to at least ancient Pompeii, where citizens scrawled messages to one another on public walls

The identity of the Tank Man in the iconic photo from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests remains unknown and was possibly killed.

In 2025, four executives from large tech companies were given positions in the US Army Reserves—including Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar, which reinforced Palantir's ties with the US military and its role as a leading defense partner.

Elk Cloner, the first computer virus to spread in public, was written as a practical joke by Richard Skrenta, a Pittsburgh high school student.

El Niño, Spanish for 'the boy,' was named after Jesus Christ because the phenomenon resembled the weather changes observed around Christmastime.

See how Budweiser's famous Clydesdales spend their days at Warm Springs Ranch, where roughly 70 to 80 of the beer brand's giant horses can be found at any given time.