2 Weeks 2 Turkey

After all the endless days waiting for fall to be here, I can hardly believe it's only two weeks until Thanksgiving!

Several of the memes are already asking for Thanksgiving memories and today I mentioned one of my favorites: the parades. We didn't watch the Macy's Parade on NBC, but what CBS now calls its "All-American Thanksgiving Parades."

I remember watching the "original" parades back when CBS called it the "Thanksgiving Parade Jubilee," the theme song was a rousing Sousa march, and the host was Captain Kangaroo (later William Conrad of Cannon sitting by the fire). The parades then were the lynchpin Macy's, Gimbel's Thanksgiving Day Parade from Philadelphia, J.L. Hudson's Thanksgiving Day Parade from Detroit, and Eaton's Santa Claus Parade from Toronto (previously taped). Sadly, Eaton's and Gimbel's are both out of business, and I believe Hudson's exists mostly as the parent company to Target, whose commercials I'm beginning to hate.

I can't remember which of the parades disappeared first, Gimbel's or Hudson's. It was replaced with that hideous videotaped spectacle in Hawaii, the Aloha Parade, with Jack Lord of Hawaii Five-O as the host. Here it was, usually a brown, sere, and cold Thanksgiving Day, real "over the river and through the woods" weather except for no snow--who wanted to watch a bunch of people in bathing suits and leis?

Then Gimbels went out of business and that put an end to that. New York just doesn't seem the same without the Macy's/Gimbel's rivalry. Eaton's either quit their sponsorship of the parade first or went out of business first, but Toronto sponsored the Santa Claus Parade for a few years. It used to be famous for its storybook floats. I guess kids who are into cell phones and anime and videogames think of storybook characters as pretty old hat now.

For a while I seem to recall that the CBS melange had a Disney parade in there. Talk about product placement.

Detroit still has a parade, I see, and there's Macy's and the Hawaii parade; the fourth is coming from Nashville now. Yawn. Yet another place for some overrated star to push his new album, like CBS's horrible coverage of the Boston Pops concert last July--mostly they had bad coverage of the fireworks, and what they showed of the concert was simply a big plug for Leeann Rimes' new album.

So we're left with Macy's on NBC. It's still fun to watch, but the acts and the commentator chatter combine that we really miss a lot of the remainder of the parade. And the commentators are so vapid. If you do have someone who knows something about the parade, it's usually upstaged by some breathless NBC airhead actress who chirps delightedly, "Why, I didn't know that. Imagine Washington crossing the Delaware in all that bad weather and that ice! Didn't his men get cold?" or similar rot.

One of the things I remember most as a small child was Thanksgiving Fridays. Of course Thanksgiving was the signal for all the Christmas specials to begin and one of the local stations might parcel them out starting the next day. But the Friday was special because all the Saturday morning cartoons pre-empted the Friday morning programming, so that week you got two doses of The Magic Land of Allakazam, Ruff and Ready, Rocky and Bullwinkle, The Superman-Aquaman Hour, and whatever else was on.