Why are New Yorkers so sick of their own obsession with parades?

Last week, word reached my British ears that there was going to be a Halloween parade through the West Village in Manhattan, and I was beside myself with excitement. A parade? A parade which included floats of dancing skeletons and 8ft-tall pumpkin people? A parade you could join if you were in costume (my favourites from my local Target: hotdog, “crazy German in lederhosen”, Wonder Woman, and over-stuffed Oreo.

No, in the good ol’ USA, you don’t have to be scary on Halloween?! I couldn’t understand why other New Yorkers weren’t jumping at the chance to go along with me. Surely this was one of the definitive social events of the year.

Well, as it turns out, there’s a good reason why – and it’s not just the fact that it takes you an hour to find a free subway and get back to Brooklyn at the end, or the fact that you spend most of a cold October night pressed up against innumerable tourists yelling at each other in French just to get a glimpse of a Joker puppet or two. It’s because a lot of people living in NYC have parade fatigue.

There’s a parade for everything in this city. I should perhaps have already clocked this, considering that when I first moved to New York in January there was a Chinese New Year parade going on (one which I duly dragged my fiance down to Chinatown to see, resulting in us both nearly getting frostbite and shouting at each other over moon cakes which had frozen solid as bricks in our hands).

As my friend and I left the Halloween parade she remarked that it would only be a couple of weeks until the Veteran’s Day military parade (11 November) and then only a couple of weeks after that until the Thanksgiving parade (28 November). After that, there’s Christmas, New Year, Chinese New Year, Valentine’s Day, St Patrick’s Day, Memorial Day, the annual Dance Parade, Easter, Independence Day, Labour Day – and then you’re back to Halloween again.

And that’s without adding in all the smaller parades which don’t include huge corporate floats and many thousands of people. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised to find that out: this is the city, after all, which originally gave us the phrase “don’t rain on my parade”. When you’re churning out linguistic cliches with parades at their centre, people ought to realise you are a place where parades make a pretty regular occurrence.

Parade fatigue doesn’t mean that there aren’t still enough New Yorkers (and tourists) to line the streets each time another convoy of floats makes its way through Manhattan.

But I think I’ve found a better way to do things. This Thanksgiving (my first ever) I’m gatecrashing a well-to-do family’s celebrations in the Upper West Side. Their annual get-together takes place at an apartment which directly overlooks the Thanksgiving parade route, meaning we can stand inside with our coffee and bagels and enjoy the view of inflatable Pikachus the size of a house without any pushing, shoving or breaking of toes.

It’s not a sustainable plan for anyone who isn’t a millionaire, but it’s going to be a hell of an experience this year. And I doubt I’ll even get a minor case of frostbite.