STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

While 34.3 million people watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on their TV sets this year, E.A. KAHANE watched it from her third-floor apartment window at 64th Street and Central Park West.

A passionate photographer, she has photographed the giant balloon characters that have passed her window for 28 years. And last year she went through the difficult task of selecting 160 images of the thousands she’s taken to include in a fold-out coffee table tome “Come Join the Parade!!”

People magazine, Vogue, NPR, Oprah and others were quick to jump on it, and Kahane found herself the center of a very lively discussion on Good Morning America, during which Al Roker called it “Genius.”

About 3.5 million people lined the 2.5-mile parade route this year.

Kahane, who has been a parttime resident of Ketchum for 21 years, will be feted with a reception from 4 to 6 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 4, at Gilman Contemporary, 661 Sun Valley Road. She’ll be signing copies of her limited-edition book. And gallery owner L’Anne Gilman will show the 3-minute micro-documentary “From My Third Floor Window,” in conjunction with the Sun Valley Film Festival being held through Sunday, Dec. 7.

The film was a finalist in the Austin Micro Film Festival.

“I never intended to make a book. I have just always loved parades because they’re exciting and fun. Jefferson Airplane sang, ‘Life is made for having fun,’ and I’ve tried to follow that,” Kahane said.

Kahane learned quite a bit about the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade as she put her book together. She learned that it was started in 1924 by Macy’s employees who had recently immigrated to America and wanted to say thanks to their new country.

E.A. KAHANE says renowned portrait photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon once took a picture of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade with Kahane’s window in it.  Kahane owns that picture now.

The early parades did not have balloons but, rather, tigers and elephants and bears borrowed from the Central Park Zoo accompanied by African-American jazz bands. But some children were afraid of the wild animals.

And, so, Macy’s window dresser Tony Sarg--also an immigrant--figured out how to turn marionette puppets upside-down to create character balloons. In 1934 he and Walt Disney collaborated on the Mickey Mouse balloon that became the face of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade for decades.

The parade began being televised nationwide in 1948 after audiences caught a glimpse of it in the 1947 film “Miracle on 34th Street.”

“Every year it feels like I’m seeing it for the first time,” said Kahane. “I don’t pay attention to the celebrities in the parade. I love the balloon characters. And sometimes they seem so close I feel like I could reach out and touch them.”

E.A. KAHANE’s official photographer badge is juxtaposed on a photo of a balloon passing her window.

Kahane has had a passion for photography ever since she was gifted a Pentax camera as a youth. She was always the one taking photos for the family album. And she took pains to get the perfect photos—say, of her parents kissing each other at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve.

But, like many, she obeyed the siren call, “Get a job,” and went into real estate to pay the rent. She revived her interest in photography when her in-laws gave her a camera, and she soon found herself taking photos of events like Wigstock and making photo books for the parents of her son’s classmates and those she vacationed with.

It was when she put on an exhibition of her work called “Central Park and Other Places” for her 50th birthday party that she realized it was time to leave real estate and pursue her passion.

She took pictures of 160 special needs children in a program that she championed. And she began taking landscape photos, focusing on the designs that she saw in nature.

E.A. KAHANE’s book features some of the adjectives used to describe the parade over the years.

“Before digital photography, one roll of film might last me a month because I would take my time and look at what I was shooting, make sure the manual settings were right,” she said. “Now, of course, it’s so inexpensive to take all kinds of pictures.”

Over the years, Kahane has taken pictures of the St. Patrick’s Day parades in New York City and Newport, R.I.; the Yankees Ticker-Tape Parade through New York City in 2009; New York’s Easter Bonnet Parade, the Festival of Cusco in Peru, the Armistice Day Parade in Paris and the Jose Martin Birthday Parade in Cuba.

Closer to home, she’s taken hundreds of photos of Ketchum’s Wagon Days Parade and Hailey’s Days of the Old West 4th of July Parade.

When COVID cancelled the Newport’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, she created a small outdoor exhibit in a Newport park showing photographs of the parade and its spectators, naming it “We Need a Parade.”

“I have shot parades around the world--my next book is going to be ‘I Love a Parade,’. ” she said.

The photos she chose for her current book include one that looks like a giant shoe on a balloon character is about to crush its handlers. Another looks straight down on a marching band with frilly white feathers in their caps. Still another shows a blown-up baseball towering above people who look like ants.

“I like Astronaut Snoopy,” she said. “But my favorite, I think, is Kermit the Frog. He is, after all, the mascot of the parade.