How Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Balloons Are Blown Up & Why They Don't Fly Away

Every year since 1994, the parade balloons are blown up during the “Macy's Balloon Inflation Celebration,” which is held on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving Day on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. 

“This is an all-day extravaganza,” Kathleen Wright, Director of Production Operations at Macy’s, told NBC New York. “We start early, early in the morning with loading in, getting the streets ready for us to land here and begin our set-up. We have hundreds of people who are here making this happen.”

On Thanksgiving Eve, “inflation team” workers and volunteers blow up all of the balloons with helium gas using long hoses that are connected to helium trucks. “To put the gas inside the balloon, we have what we call inflation sleeves because it looks like the sleeve on your shirt,” John Piper, Vice President of Macy’s Studios, explained to Scholastic. “Once that’s inside, we can turn on the blower.”

Because of their large size, the balloons are designed to have a few different air chambers. “It’s a mixture of art and science inflating the Macy’s parade balloons,” Macy’s spokesperson Orlando Veras explained in a video for The New York Times. “They’re all created in chambers, so part of the magic of what you see on Thanksgiving Day is a balloon that’s been put together from different parts of a balloon. The arm might be a chamber, the ear might be a different chamber.”

During this inflation process, the massive balloons are secured down with netting so they don’t fly away. Wright explained to NBC New York that it takes around eight hours to inflate the whole line-up of balloons and that some of the larger balloons can take up to an hour each to fill.

With so much helium inside them, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons could easily fly away. But thanks to a trusty team of balloon “handlers” or “holders,” they stay put as they make their way down the parade route. 

“All of the balloons have lines attached to them that go to the handlers,” the VP of Macy’s Studios explained to Scholastic. “People hold the line and that’s how they control the balloon in the parade.”

Anywhere between 80 to 100 balloon handlers per balloon hold onto what they call the “dog bone,” a device with handles that allows them to control the line and adjust the rope for factors like wind. USA Today’s Kate McCarthy compared holding the parade balloons to “a resistance band at its tautest.”

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Back in the day, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons would be released into the sky where they’d eventually burst. However, as NBC News Stay Tuned reports, that all came to end in 1933 after a deflated balloon caused an airplane to crash. 

Nowadays, the balloons are simply deflated right after the parade. In this video, you can see parade workers holding onto the lines and pressing on the balloon as the helium is released. They then get rolled up, placed in a bin, and are stored at Macy’s Studio in Moonachie, New Jersey for future use.