At a cost of around $12 million dollars a year, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is one of the most expensive holiday traditions of the season. This year, however, to the joy of Macy’s executives, the parade cost the company significantly less in helium costs than in previous years.

The retail giant reportedly hired a team of civil engineers from Brooklyn to find an alternative method of inflating the rubber behemoths and their solution was surprising.

“The balloons rise with hot air,” team leader Eric began, adjusting his infinity scarf, “So we thought, ‘why not tap into the biggest source of hot air we can find?’”

As it turns out, that source was none other than the President of the United States, Donald Trump.

“We did the calculations, and Donald produces enough hot air each week to power the entire state of Rhode Island for a day, at little to no cost,” he explained. “We knew if we could tap into that, we could slash numbers dramatically.”

Once the team were confident in their strategy, they devised a plan to harvest the resources.

“It wasn’t as hard as we thought, actually,” Eric explained. “First, we held a fake press conference. We told the president it was an interview for Fox and Friends, and he quickly agreed. We set him up at a podium in one of our conference rooms and told him to speak directly into the microphone.”

The microphone, we came to learn, was not a microphone at all, but rather a funnel connected to a few empty air canisters with a reinforced garden hose.

“A few of our interns pretended to be reporters. At first, they fed the president questions they knew would get him worked up, like, ‘What’s up with Congress?’ and, ‘Mitch McConnell – he looks like a turtle, right?’ Those worked for a while, but after an hour, we had only collected enough hot air to fill the Asian half of Hello Kitty.”

It would be more productive, the executives and engineers agreed, to turn it up a notch.

“All I said was ‘So, Mexicans,’ and the steam started flowing. We knew we were on the right track.”

For the next three hours, with phrases like, “Kenya. Is that in the United States?” the team collected enough hot air to fill every balloon on the parade circuit and Donald Trump had once again saved the day.

No word yet on whether the alternative energy source could be harnessed across the globe, though for once, the United States appears to control one of the greatest sources of hot air in the world – stockpiled in Washington, D.C.

Satire does not reflect the views and opinions of The Mirror.