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Welcome to another episode of Context Clues, where we give you excerpts from previous episodes

that will help shed some light on the new topic at hand. I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American Hysteria.

As a Westcoaster, who has never wanted to get up at 5 a.m. on a day off to watch the loud

technicolor spectacle that is the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, I've only ever really

been interested in the fanfare because sometimes the balloons explode. So I came into this topic

as an anthropologist to study a distant

culture that I really knew very little about. What hooked me in were the little stories that I'd

heard over the years here and there about the wild spirit of what was originally called the Macy's Christmas parade,

which muzzled Thanksgiving and turned it into an extremely elaborate announcement

that the Christmas season was finally here, and Black Friday would kick off at the department store

the following day. What I ended up

uncovering during my research showed me that the early Macy's parade and the parades that

had existed on the same streets for many decades prior were charged with a true chaos energy,

a strange electricity that made Thanksgiving Day into an

absolute wild card of a holiday. Now, we won't be discussing Thanksgiving itself, how the bullshit

...