I first contacted Macy’s in the Summer of 2011 regarding holding a cartoon balloon in their Thanksgiving Day Parade. I sent e-mails to a few people in the Media Relations department and told them that I was writing a book about doing the things on my bucket list and this one was at the top of the list. The next day I had a response from Julie Strider, the Director of Media Relations, thanking me for my e-mail and letting me know that she forwarded it to the guy who was in charge of such requests.
“This is going to be easy,” I excitedly thought to myself.
I sent him one of my books, and a letter request mentioning the forwarded e-mail now that I had a name to drop on him. (Once I have the name of someone I’ve made contact with, I drop it blatantly, unashamedly, and often… Julie Strider Sent Me!) About a month went by and I never heard back from the guy. I called him on the phone, mentioned Julie Strider, the book I’d sent, and my request to hold one of the big cartoon balloons in the parade. He told me that all volunteers are either Macy’s employees or their friends or family members. To literally rain on my parade a little harder, he added that they get a couple hundred media requests to be in the parade each year. Road block, looks like the 2011 wasn‘t going to be my year.
I spent the next year casually asking friends who work in the retail industry if they knew anybody at Macy’s who could sponsor me, nothing. A friend who works in management for Saks suggested I try to find and contact Macy’s employees through Linkedin. I searched Linkedin for Macy’s employee and sent some private messages, but didn’t hear back from any of them. I’m only in one group on Linkedin so I posted a message to that group.
“Does anybody know anybody on any level at Macy’s?”
I received a response the next day from a guy I’d never met before named Chris Miller. He wrote that he knew a lady named Kimberley Brooke who ran the charitable foundation for the CEO of Macy’s, and included her e-mail address. I immediately wrote her a “Chris Miller Sent Me!” e-mail. I listed some of my past bucket list accomplishments and she liked that I had once peed with Gene Simmons (for some reason that’s the one that always catches people‘s attention). She agreed to forward my e-mail to her contact at Macy’s.
Soon thereafter, I received an e-mail from Macy’s requesting some basic information: birth date, social security number, just enough to do a preliminary search to eliminate al qaeda members. Once I sent that back they sent me the full on-line application. There was already a name in the sponsor’s box, so I felt like the hard part was done. I watched the required 15 minute balloon handler’s video, had my wife measure me for my costume, answered all the health related questions: “Can you walk for two and a half miles?” and submitted the application. I received a congratulatory e-mail that welcomed me as a volunteer into the parade, so I started making plans to fly to NYC for Thanksgiving. My “Official Entry Pass” arrived in the mail a few weeks after that assigning me to the Elf on the Shelf balloon.
Elf on the Shelf is a fairly new story about this little mischievous elf who updates Santa on a daily basis about each kids naughty or nice status. He’s basically Santa’s lil’ bitch… a snitch, a rat, a nark for Jolly Ol‘ St. Nick. If kids were smart they’d get some Juvenile Hall heavy to whack the little squealer and bury his elf corpse in a New Jersey landfill. Anyway, he’s a first time balloon in the Macy’s parade and that’s the one I got.
On Thanksgiving morning I awoke at 5:15 which was 2:15 on my California body clock, but I had been waking up just about every hour all night anyway so at least I was up for good. About 5:45 I grabbed a coffee from the corner store and strolled west on 34th Street in front of the Empire State Building on my way to my rally point at the New Yorker Hotel. The streets were dark and empty and I kind of felt like Will Smith in the movie “I Am Legend.” The crowd-control temporary sidewalk fencing started about a block before Macy’s where NYC finest barricaded streets and eager parade watchers claimed their spots three hours before the start.
The hotel was just a stone’s throw from Madison Square Garden and the line to get into the hotel strung out front around the corner and half way around the block. I got in line, (or on-line as they say in NY), behind a young woman from Virginia who was a three-year parade veteran. I sipped my coffee and engaged in some pre-parade pabulum…
“What balloon are you holding?”
“Papa Smurf.”
“Cool.”
“How ’bout you?”
“Elf on the Shelf.”
“Cool.”
A frantic woman speaking to no one in particular blurted out, “Is this where the clowns line-up?”
I just looked at her and gave her an “I dunno” shrug of the shoulders, but Virginia said, “This is for balloon handlers, clowns are on the other side of the building.” She hurried off to get her clown on.
We had to show our Official Entry Pass and an identification card to enter the hotel lobby. They pointed us to the fourth floor meeting rooms that would serve as our dressing rooms. They had about 60 red and white elf costumes hanging on a rack with people in various stages of getting elfified. After I got my costume on it was back out into the dawning Manhattan morning and onto a bus filled with other various costumed-clad volunteers on our way to our staging area at 81st Street and Central Park West.
Upon arrival you could see the tethered and netted cartoon balloons fully inflated and laying on the street like they’d been captured by one of those Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom safaris where Jack & Jim toss a net over a cheetah.
Elf on the Shelf was the third balloon from the end of the parade between the Hello Kitty & Buzz Lightyear balloons, so we had a while to wait. I strolled around looking at all the other volunteers dressed up like they’d run off to join the circus.
The lines to use the scarce port-o-potties were long, and let me tell you, once you’re in a an elf jumpsuit peeing in a port-o-potty is no picnic!
Our captain, a short & smiley high energy gal with glasses, called us over for some pre-parade instructions followed by stretching & calisthenics. We were then introduced to the family that had created the Elf on the Shelf book. Once they let us into the netting area to grab a rope the cagey & sagey veterans of past parades rushed in like Who fans at Riverfront. Newbies like me quickly found out why, they overbook the volunteers so there are more elves than ropes. Initially I didn’t get a rope, but I was standing next to a couple of sisters and Diane from Ohio offered to share her rope after learning that this was a bucket list item and that I’d come all the way from California to participate. About ten o’clock we finally made the turn off of 81st Street onto Central Park West. The parade officially started at 77th street so we had a four street “Spring Training” to learn how to raise and lower the Elf to avoid the balloon-popping branches of over-hanging Central Park Trees.
The crowds, even before the official start lines, were huge. People stood five or six rows deep on the sidewalk, and filled the steps of the New York Historical Society museum to view the parade. My job at this point was to wave at the crowd, scream out this lame “Elf, Elf, Elf” cheer and try not to get run over by the golf cart that is the real balloon anchor.
We passed by the Dakota apartment building, New York’s most exclusive apartment building at 72nd Street where John Lennon lived & died. There were lots of people looking out the windows from of their apartments, so I kept an eye out for Yoko.
We flew our glorified kite past Trump’s International Hotel to Columbus Circle and turned east on Central Park South. Our captain was notified that the parade was running a little long so we had to start jogging. We turned south on 6th Ave, past the CBS telecast, and I received a text message from a friend saying, “Watching Elf on a Shelf on CBS now – can’t see you yet! Happy Thanksgiving.”
We continued down 6th Ave past Radio City Music Hall and Rockefeller Center. Diane, true to her offer, gave up the reins for a few blocks, and I got to be an official Macy‘s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon handler.
Occasionally, our leaders would give us some direction regarding speeding up or slowing down our walking pace, or bringing in or letting out some rope, but the weather was picture perfect, not even a breeze to deal with, so holding the elf balloon was easy.
After a few blocks I quickly found that it was actually more fun to just walk and wave and look at the crowds. I especially liked looking at the people in the skyscrapers watching from their apts, rooms, and offices. A lot of people in the crowd were holding signs stating where they were from, the Texans got a Hook ‘em Horns hand sign from me. We stopped for about ten minutes at Herald Square before turning onto 34th Street to give Trace Atkins time to sing his song, “She Thinks We’re Just Fishin’ for the NBC telecast in front of Macy’s flagship store. Then it was our turn for national exposure. All the love went to the big plump floating elf while all the rope-holding little elves were virtually ignored.
“Hey! How ‘bout panning the cameras down a little, I came all the way from California to be humiliated in an elf costume on national TV!”
As we passed the platform where NBC was telecasting from, Matt Lauer & Al Roker turned around and waved at us, the new Katie Couric-wannabe didn’t. We turned right on 8th Ave and walked up a few blocks to the deflating area. Diane said that this was her favorite part of the experience, which I thought was an odd comment. Whoever says that their favorite time at a party is the clean-up afterwards? To each his own.
You could almost hear the elf sigh, “What a relief,” as the gas he’d been holding since 81st street flowed out of his flaps like Senior Citizen Day at the Cabbage Festival. I thought about breathing in the escaping helium so that I could sing “we represent the Lollipop Kids” , but instead let it flow out into the NYC sky. A lot of us volunteers laid on the elf pushing the remaining helium out on him like the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube. The elf was folded and rolled into a ball and loaded into a cart and then into a truck. It was interesting to see how fast it went from being viewed on national television by 40 million people to being folded up and inside a moving truck.
Guess it’s a reminder to enjoy the moment because one minute you’re flying high over the greatest city in the world, and the next you’re deflated and in a New Jersey warehouse.
Life Lesson Learned: It’s the journey not the destination. Persistence pays off. Appreciative for the kindness of strangers.
Related Quote: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
Blanche DuBois via Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
How You Can Do It Too: Find a Macy’s employee to sponsor you once, and you’re in for life!
