For nearly a century, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has been a turkey-day tradition. For 20 of those years, so was Matt Lauer, as a co-host of NBC’s broadcast of the event. His presence was part of the day whether you liked it or not, like political bickering and your uncle’s weird, gelatinous side dish.

But this year, Mr. Lauer is gone. He was ousted from NBC just after Thanksgiving last year, over allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior. And so for the first time since 1997, Mr. Lauer did not visit the millions of American living rooms tuned in to the parade.

Twitter was pretty happy about that.