The 2026 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is set for Thursday, Nov. 26, and Macy’s is calling it the 100th. The first Macy’s march was in 1924, which is 102 years earlier. If a parade had run every year since, 2026 would be the 103rd, so the label looks three short.
The missing three are documented. Library of Congress archival newspaper material places the pause at 1942 through 1944, and counting 1924 through 2026 inclusive gives 103 possible editions. Remove the three cancelled years and the total is 100. The 102 is the distance between two dates. The 100 is a tally of parades that took place. Both are correct because they measure different things.
The hundredth anniversary of the first march fell in 2024. The hundredth edition arrives in 2026 because of the three missed years. A date can return every November. An edition takes a parade.
A department store takes to the street
The Macy’s march began in 1924. The Library of Congress describes early Thanksgiving parades with animals, costumes, floats and marching bands. The store’s march joined a kind of holiday procession that already existed. The New York parade has its own count, and the year it started is one date in the longer history of those events.
The Library’s chronology puts Philadelphia’s Thanksgiving parade in 1920, four years ahead of the Macy’s march in New York. Detroit’s parade also dates to 1924. Philadelphia, Detroit and New York had separate processions. For the November 2026 milestone, Macy’s is counting the one that began in New York in 1924.
The American Jewish Historical Society holds several home movies of the parade in the Kurt K. Field collection. The collection follows the Field family’s leisure time from 1939 through 1966. The parade appears among the family’s outings. Those visits offer a second view of the event, separate from Macy’s own account of its history. The society keeps the home movies together as the Kurt K. Field Film Collection, which stretches well beyond the handful of Thanksgiving visits.
In its account of early parades, the historical society describes Union Pacific Railroad floats, rocket ships and a small airplane pulling Santa’s workshop. The society also draws attention to stereotyped portrayals of Indigenous people in the Field footage. The films preserve those images alongside familiar parts of the procession, including bands, balloons and Santa.
Cartoon balloons before the war
In its history of Thanksgiving parades, the Library of Congress includes cartoon-character balloons among the figures people saw by the 1930s. For a procession that already had floats, bands and people in costumes, a balloon added a figure that could travel above everything rolling or marching along the street.
The Library names Boob McNutt in 1930 and Mickey Mouse in 1934 as examples of characters that became balloons. The two figures came out of different kinds of entertainment: a comic strip and an animated cartoon. Both found a place in a street parade.
Three Thanksgivings without a parade
The pause lasted from 1942 through 1944. The Library of Congress connects those cancellations to wartime demand for helium and rubber. The same materials that helped make a parade character visible across a city block were needed elsewhere. Thanksgiving still came around in each of those years, but there was no Macy’s procession to add to the count.
The American Jewish Historical Society dates the Field family’s visits to 1940, 1945 and 1946. The last two dates fall after the wartime pause. Those three visits make the New York parade a recurring event in one family’s record.
What Macy’s plans to put on the street in 2026
Macy’s says the 2026 parade will have 100 inflatable elements. It also lists floats and marching bands in the lineup. Both the balloons and the bands are part of the plans for the New York route this November. Macy’s lists Santa as the closing float.
One new balloon confirmed for the Nov. 26 parade is Bluey. Bluey’s official parade announcement says the festive crown is inspired by the show’s Christmas Swim episode. It puts the balloon’s dimensions at 47 feet long, nearly 28 feet wide and just over 47 feet tall. Ludo Studio designed the pose, and Macy’s Parade Studio made the balloon.
Macy’s also lists a new Mickey balloon based on the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The name is the same one the Library of Congress includes among its early cartoon balloons. For this parade, the costume and pose belong to a particular role. A returning character can give the lineup both an old name and a new shape.
Macy’s says its Blue Sky Gallery will bring back balloons with designs by Tim Burton, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons and Yayoi Kusama. That group differs from the new balloons in the lineup. The gallery is bringing back designs from earlier parades, while this year’s Bluey and Sorcerer’s Apprentice Mickey are new. The two groups share the route on Nov. 26. Anyone watching can look for the gallery designs among the characters from comics, cartoons and films.
What to look for on Nov. 26
Macy’s Nov. 13 announcement, reproduced by the Appeal-Democrat, gives the parade a 2.5-mile route from Manhattan’s Upper West Side to Herald Square. The event is scheduled for Thursday, Nov. 26, with NBC and Telemundo broadcasting at 8:30 a.m. in each time zone and Peacock streaming it.
The Library of Congress traces coverage of Thanksgiving parades from radio to television. Once people could follow a parade from home, the morning did not have to involve a trip to Manhattan. Macy’s current broadcast schedule adds the streaming option to that history. The audience in a New York street is only part of the audience for the march. The Library also describes a 2020 prefilmed special instead of the usual gathering. It says viewers could still take part from home. That year the giant balloons were slated to move through the streets with vehicles instead of the usual people walking them.
The Field family went in 1940, then again in 1945 and 1946. Their home movies put those trips on either side of a pause that lasted three Thanksgivings. They give us dates when the family was there. What returning to the parade meant to them is unknown.
