Pre-emptive action by New York’s finest enabled Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to float, march, and twirl it’s way to Herald Square today, without so much as a side-step being necessary to avoid protestors bent on disrupting the annual event.

Police arrested seven of the protestors near 37th street and Seventh Avenue, where they were apparently aiming to break into the parade route. But the disruption was modest and was hard to detect from a block away, where the Sun had set up one of its watches.

The protest failed to sway so much as one of the giant balloons that have become a trademark of the parade — Snoopy, Sponge Bob, the Pillsbury Dough Boy, and a Red Power Ranger among them — glided from the Museum of Natural History to Herald Square, completing the 88th parade.

Absent this year was Virginia O’Hanlon, the Upper East Side girl of eight who, in 1897, wrote her famous letter asking the editor of The New York Sun whether there is a Santa Claus. The reply — disclosing that Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Clause — became the most widely reprinted piece of journalism in history. Virginia emerged as a balloon in the 2010 parade, part of the department store’s “Believe” advertising campaign, which built on the Virginia O’Hanlon story.

This year the weather was cool and damp, but not raining, which seemed to match the mood of a city — and tens of thousands of tourists — still waiting for the economy to come fully out of the recession that has dampened holiday shopping since 2008.Retail sales nationally are up from the sharp drop between 2007 and 2009, but have yet to return to their levels before the great recession.