The 1920s marked a high point of attention to the child consumer as much as to the adult shopper. A sign of the growing importance attached to the child consumer was Macy's first Macy's Christmas parade, held on Thanksgiving Day in 1924. The tradition of the spectacle parade had its roots, as William Leach discusses in Land of Desire (1993), in carnival-like "ragamuffin" parading on Thanksgiving Day, popular in New York City particularly among immigrants, both adults and groups of begging children, going back to at least the nineteenth century (pp. 331-32, 334).
The December 1924 issue of the trade journal, Merchants Record and Show Window. An Illustrated Monthly Journal for Merchants, Display Managers and Advertising Men, carried "Notes from New York," subtitled "Macy's parade and great mechanical showing of Christmas toys." The article mentions prize-winning Fifth Avenue windows and the first Macy's Christmas Parade, which boasted an abundance of fairy-tale-theme floats calculated to increase toy and other merchandise sales to adults trying to appeal to children. The parade was an unparalleledly successful consumer spectacle, repeated annually throughout the 1920s, and of course has continued up to the present day, ushering in a frenzied Christmas shopping blitz a month before the holiday.
Magazines with names like Playthings, Toy World, and Toys and Novelties (none of them included in our collection) record the immense popularity and profitability of the expanding phenomenon of the child consumer, with Toy Departments and "Toylands" in department stores everywhere, even stores as dignified as Saks Fifth Avenue. Toy fairs and conventions held by the toy industry went into high gear. Christmas parades with floats, sponsored by department stores, proliferated. The New York Wanamaker's store showed the movie "The North Wind," about Santa's preparations at the North Pole, to hundreds of children and their mothers at four screenings daily. Specially decorated, panoramic Christmas store windows featured mechanical toys and marionettes. Santa Claus, a holiday mainstay at stores everywhere, ritually noted youngsters' gift wishes. (INTRO NOTE Retailing)