So today, I'm posting up our episode with Thanksgiving stories. Some of you are probably out on the road

driving to friends or family, or maybe going to the airport. This year, my situation is the

exact opposite. Early Tuesday, I returned home to California from doing some events for the new book out

on the East Coast. And honestly, I'm looking forward just to relaxing with friends and family

for a few days before I head out again. But right now, I'm going to bump up our Thanksgiving

episode to the front of the feed as a way to help all of us get into the mood for the holidays ahead.

So here are a set of stories about Disney and Thanksgiving, stories that start with the time of Walt himself and then move up to four more recent years. So whether

you're in a car or on a plane or out for a walk or prepping up the feast in the kitchen, here

are a set of stories that hopefully gets you in the mood for the holidays this year.

Let's start with this.

In a world before TV and the Internet,

how does a studio get its characters in front of tens of millions of viewers? Let's say the year is 1934, just before Mickey Mouse turned six.

How do you pull this off?

Well, the answer is simple, but difficult to put together.

You create a spectacle, something larger than life, a dream that perhaps floats above a city,

as such images will be carried in newspapers and magazines and newsreels across the country,

more specifically. You create an enormous inflatable balloon of Mickey Mouse, something that needs to be held

down by 40 men, and then place it in what was then called, the Macy's Christmas Parade,

later known as the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

These balloons now have their own traditions, but back in the early 1930s, they were conceived of as upside-down

marionettes. A traditional marionette is a puppet whose master stands above it with the strings

falling down to the puppet's head, hands, and feet. Pull a little string, and the puppet who is below raises its hand.

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