Families grow up, move away and lose loved ones. Each November, giant balloons and marching bands still call every generation back to the living room.
By EEW Magazine Online Editors
Al Roker, Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb at NBC’s broadcast desk in Herald Square during a previous Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. (Peter Kramer/NBC via Getty Images)
Before the turkey is carved, the table is set or the first slice of sweet potato pie is served, Thanksgiving has already begun in millions of American homes. The television is on, marching bands are playing and giant balloons are drifting above the streets of Manhattan, while someone in the living room calls for everybody to come see who is headed down the parade route.
It's a familiar scene that has played out across generations, and this year it gets a centennial celebration. The 100th Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade steps off Thursday, Nov. 26, with a record 100 inflatables, a star-filled lineup and enough childhood favorites to make grandparents and grandchildren equally excited, Macy's announced.
Al Roker, who has been part of NBC's parade coverage since 1995, returns to the broadcast alongside Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb. The morning has personal meaning for him. After blood clots kept him home in 2022, the first parade he had missed in 27 years, Roker came back the following year and told viewers, "I am so thankful to be anywhere this year, but especially here."
That gratitude echoes in living rooms across the country. The balloons are enormous and the production is spectacular, and for many families the greatest gift is how familiar it all feels. Many of us watched the parade as children beside our parents and grandparents, and now we watch it with another generation tucked under the same blanket.
Research helps explain why those mornings stay with us. In a 2016 study titled "Family Rituals Improve the Holidays," published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, Harvard Business School researcher Ovul Sezer and her colleagues examined 1,098 participants across three studies. People who shared rituals with their families during the holidays reported feeling closer to one another and enjoying the season more.
The research looked at Christmas and New Year's Eve, and it shows a link between ritual and enjoyment without proving that one produces the other. Even so, one finding rings true for anyone whose Thanksgiving starts with the parade. As Scientific American reported, the kind of ritual made little direct difference to how much people enjoyed the holiday, while families who kept more of them enjoyed it more.
A mother sets out breakfast while the children call out each balloon by name, and Grandma, who has watched for decades, knows almost to the minute when Santa will reach Herald Square. Years later, those ordinary mornings are the ones families talk about.
Nostalgia adds to that feeling. A 2023 review in the journal Current Opinion in Psychology found that looking back fondly tends to strengthen people's sense of belonging, which in turn helps them feel that their past and present lives are connected. That may be why a familiar holiday tradition grows more meaningful with age. The memory holds who we were, who sat beside us and what those mornings meant.
The parade itself had a surprisingly humble beginning. The first parade marched on Nov. 27, 1924, under the name Macy's Christmas Parade, according to the Library of Congress. Many of the store employees who staged it were immigrants or first-generation Americans who drew inspiration from the festive celebrations of their ancestral homelands, and the procession featured elaborate costumes, marching performers and live animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo.
Yes, actual zoo animals.
The giant character balloons that became the parade's signature arrived in 1927, when puppeteer Tony Sarg helped introduce the concept. His early designs drew on marionettes, essentially turning puppets upside down so enormous figures could travel above the crowd, and Felix the Cat became the first character balloon.
The Felix the Cat balloon floats above the crowd during the 1932 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York. (George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images)
Organizers once had a playful habit of releasing the balloons into the sky after the festivities and offering rewards to anyone who found and returned them. In 1931, a 40-foot blue hippopotamus floated away and was never recovered. Macy's is bringing a new version of that famous runaway back for the 100th celebration.
The parade has lived through hard history, too. It was canceled in 1942, 1943 and 1944, when rubber and helium were needed for the World War II effort. The celebration returned in 1945, and NBC began carrying it nationally in the early 1950s, turning a New York event into a Thanksgiving morning ritual from coast to coast.
This year's centennial lineup reaches every generation. Bluey, Hello Kitty, Sorcerer's Apprentice Mickey, and Joe Cool and Woodstock are among the characters taking to the sky, and Felix the Cat returns for the first time since 2016.
EEW readers will spot plenty of familiar faces along the route. Queen Latifah, Keke Palmer, Wyclef Jean, Leslie Odom Jr. and Jimmy Fallon and The Roots are among the performers, with Teddy Swims and Megan Moroney set for featured performances at Herald Square. Holly Robinson Peete and her husband, former NFL quarterback Rodney Peete, will make special appearances.
The Divine Nine Unity Step Team will bring stepping to the parade route as well. The Divine Nine are the nine historically Black fraternities and sororities of the National Pan-Hellenic Council, and stepping, with its stomps, claps and call-and-response chants, has been part of their culture for generations. For the women who pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha, Delta Sigma Theta, Zeta Phi Beta or Sigma Gamma Rho, seeing that tradition on one of the country's biggest stages will feel a lot like home.
Behind the spectacle, Macy's says more than 11,000 volunteers and participants will bring the day to life. Marching bands from Hawaii to Connecticut will join Macy's Great American Marching Band, which represents students from all 50 states, giving families watching from home a reason to cheer for their own.
New characters and new music arrive every year, and each generation gets its turn in the spotlight while the feeling of the morning stays the same.
The Minnie Mouse balloon floats past Macy’s Herald Square during the 99th Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2025. (NBC)
Perhaps the loveliest thing about the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is that it asks nothing elaborate of the families who watch it. The table can be simple, the house can be empty and the holiday can look very different from the ones we remember.
Some families will crowd several generations onto one couch. Some will watch from a quieter living room this year, missing the mothers, fathers and grandparents who once shared those mornings. On Thanksgiving, grief and gratitude often sit side by side, and remembering the loved ones who watched with us becomes its own way of thanking God for the years He gave.
There is comfort in knowing that wherever we are and however our lives have changed, familiar balloons will return to the Manhattan sky, the marching bands will play and Santa Claus will once again bring the celebration to a close.
After 100 parades, families still turn on the television, call everyone in from the kitchen and make one more memory together.
The 100th Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade airs Thursday, Nov. 26, 2026, beginning at 8:30 a.m. in all U.S. time zones on NBC and Peacock, with a Spanish-language broadcast on Telemundo. NBC will also premiere the documentary "America's Parade: 100 Years of Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade" on Nov. 20 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.