Fun Facts about America's Thanksgiving Parade

Source: The Parade Company

• MSN.com has ranked America's Thanksgiving Parade the #1 thing everyone must see when they come to Detroit.
• Let Freedom Ring, the new float sponsored by GM, can be disassembled into 32 pieces and transported on a semi-truck.
• It took more than 2,200 hours of work to prepare the 78 paper-mache heads for the first-ever museum exhibit at The Henry Ford Museum.
• The wall on Thomas Edison's Menlo Park lab on the new Energy Innovators float has more than 800 jump bricks that were made by childen of all ages at The Parade Company.
• Thanksgiving eve is one of the top five days for pizza deliveries each year along with Super Bowl Sunday, New Year's Day, New Year's Eve and Halloween.
• It would take a float more than one month for drive nonstop from Detroit to Los Angeles. The average speed of a float is 3 miles per hour.
• The first parade has four bands, a few giant paper-mache heads and ten floats, attracting 100,00 spectators. Today, the two-hour parade includes more than 75 units and is viewed by one million curbside fans and another 104 million households nationwise.
• After Mardi Gras parades, America's Thanksgiving Parade is the 2nd largest distributor of beads along a parade route.
• Only 7 other countries in the world have official Thanksgiving Day holidays -- Switzerland, Argentina, Canada, Brazil, Japan, Korea, and Liberia.

Back to our Thanksgiving 2004 special section.

America's Thanksgiving Parade is a registered trademark of The Parade Company.