Tomorrow brings the 90th annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. But did you know this proud, family-friendly American tradition started out in a totally creepy and scary way?
Perhaps you’ve seen photos from the parade’s early history before—in 2013, the Atlantic Wire ran a choice selection, noting that:
There was a time when the balloons in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade weren’t inflated billboards for terrible movies and cartoons. Eighty years ago, the balloons were instead weird animals and dead-eyed people — suggesting that, for once, the dominance of marketing might have been a good thing.
Truly it was a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade of Horrors, most notably in the late 1920s and early 1930s, an extravaganza of alarming balloons crawling along close to the ground like great skittering beasts.
Please note that, according to Time, in 1927 the balloons were released into the air at the event’s conclusion and many of them immediately popped.