The Charlotte Jewish News- November 2026- Page 47

By Sara Solar

I love dipping apples in honey on Rosh Hashanah. Latkes frying in oil are one of my favorite sounds, and I look forward to eating matzah brei every year at Passover. If you can’ t tell, I associate most holidays with food.

As much as I love Rosh Hashanah, Chanukah and Passover, I absolutely love Thanksgiving. It is, hands down, my favorite holiday. I love the food, of course, but I also love that it brings family together, makes us focus on gratitude

and gives me an excuse to make three different kinds of pie. And I absolutely love a parade.

Thanksgiving morning is not complete until I have prepared homemade cinnamon rolls and settled down on the couch with my family to watch the Macy’ s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The floats, marching bands and Broadway performances, I love it all. And this nice Jewish girl has to admit that I even look forward to seeing Santa at the end! I have not missed a Macy’ s parade for as long as I can remember. Attending the parade in person is on my bucket list.

This year is a big one for parade fans: 2026 marks the 100th Macy’ s Thanksgiving Day Parade. And as I recently discovered, there is quite a bit of Jewish history hiding behind those giant balloons. Jewish brothers Nathan and Isidor Straus acquired R. H. Macy & Co. in 1895 and helped build it into the retail giant we know today. But Macy’ s did not actually invent the Thanksgiving parade. That honor belongs to another Jewish-founded department store: Gimbels.

Jewish immigrant Adam Gimbel founded the Gimbels department store business, which eventually expanded to Philadelphia and New York. In 1920, Gimbels hosted what is considered the first Thanksgiving Day parade in the country, just four years before Macy’ s launched its famous New York City parade. The Gimbels parade continued until 1986.

And then there is one of my favorite Jewish parade moments. In 2013, Thanksgiving and the first night of Chanukah fell on the same day, a rare event dubbed“ Thanksgivukkah.” Macy’ s celebrated with a dreidel-shaped“ balloonicle.” Unfortunately, the dreidel deflated somewhere along Central Park West, but it was quickly repaired and returned to the parade route.

I love this little piece of history because it reminds me that Jewish and American traditions are not always separate. Sometimes they overlap in unexpected, silly and wonderful ways.

Maybe that is why Thanksgiving feels so familiar to me. Like our Jewish holidays, it is about gathering around a table, sharing food, telling stories and creating traditions we pass down from one generation to the next.

And perhaps that is where the gratitude comes in. Jewish tradition asks us not only to feel grateful but to practice gratitude: to pause, to give thanks and to recognize the many blessings in our lives. For me, one of those blessings is the collection of traditions, big and small, that bring my family together year after year.

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So this Thanksgiving, I will once again be on the couch with my family, eating a cinnamon roll, watching the floats and waiting for Santa to make his grand appearance. And, of course, I’ ll be thinking about what kind of pie I should make. Because some traditions are just too important to give up.

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