The difference between which kinds of public events can and cannot happen during this pandemic can often seem bafflingly arbitrary, with some states saying restaurants are okay but not bars or that gyms are okay but not movie theaters. Or maybe it’s the other way around? It’s confusing no matter what, though any confusion can at least be pushed aside with the realization that you probably don’t need to go anywhere anyway. Now, in a step toward keeping people at home and ensuring that they don’t even need to leave for big outdoor events, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced that the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is going virtual.
It seems like it would be relatively straightforward to do a parade with no audience, as unsettling as that would be for the people carrying the balloons, but the Macy’s parade is going to be a “different kind of event” according to The Wrap. De Blasio says it won’t be a “live parade,” but it will be “something that will really give us that warmth and that great feeling we have on Thanksgiving day.” The Wrap story doesn’t say exactly what that means, but the Macy’s twitter account has promised a “televised-only spectacle where all your fave balloons, floats, and Santa Clause *safely* make their way to you”—and no, it probably doesn’t mean they’ll be coming out of the TV like Samara, though that would certainly be a different kind of event.
The link in that tweet takes you to a page promising more updates “on what to expect,” and if we didn’t know any better, we’d take that to mean that nobody really knows what this is going to look like just yet. It’s not too late put Santa and the balloons into a haunted video tape so they can come out of the TV. Just throwing that out there.