Thanksgiving has always been a momentous holiday in my household.
My family's onging Thanksgiving tradition is spending hours of quality time in the kitchen to prepare each and every holiday dish from scratch. There's never a dull moment when we're all beating the clock to hand knead homemade dough for four different pies, prep our own marinade for the big bird and make freshly squeezed orange juice for the cranberry sauce.
But our most notable tradition is gathering around the television to watch the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Once Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York" theme plays at 9 in the morning sharp, our Thanksgiving festivities commence.
For more than 75 years, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade has been both the biggest and the second-oldest Thanksgiving parade in the United States. The annual shindig kicks off on West 77th Street & Central Park West and ends at noon outside Macy's Herald Square. What makes the parade so fun to watch is its itinerary of unique floats and balloons, which changes every year.
From a Minion-themed balloon to a Wonder bread float, here are 8 new floats and balloons to keep an eye out for during this year's parade:
Macy's legacy tree float honors the Wampanoag Tribe, who have inhabited present-day Massachusetts and Eastern Rhode Island for more than 12,000 years. "The float's pathways symbolize the colors of the four directions, led by Grandmother Eastern Pine Tree, adorned by wampum shells of the water, & surrounded by sweetgrass, sassafras & wild berry plant relatives," according to Macy's.
Elders from the Wampanoag Tribe of Mashpee & Cape Cod, Massachusetts will also be in attendance at the parade, sitting in a place of honor atop the float.
Get ready for that song to haunt your tryptophan-induced dreams.
The comical character from Illumination's "Minions: The Rise of Gru" is traveling down the Parade route soon with his favorite food, a banana, in hand. Stuart is 37 feet tall, or as high as a three-story building; 40 feet long, or as long as seven bicycles; and 28 feet wide, or as wide as six taxi cabs.
Per the parade's official website, Stuart "is the first Parade balloon to ever use details created by a 3D printer." That's, um, bananas.
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