It’s here! The day on which many of us will find comfort in the company of family and friends, enjoy a day off work and have the opportunity to stuff our faces with no judgement.
For centuries, Americans have celebrated Thanksgiving as a time of reflection on the people, places and things and ideas in our lives that we should and do feel grateful for. The holiday has evolved over the years, but the basic motivating factor for celebrating Thanksgiving—to give thanks—has held strong as a uniting factor among our fellow neighbors.
As you sit around the table and converse with your loved ones today, here are a few fun Thanksgiving facts that might make for interesting conversation starters!
- Fifty pilgrims and 90 Wampanoag Indians celebrated the first Thanksgiving in fall of 1621. The celebration lasted three days.
- Turkey was not on the menu at the first Thanksgiving. Meats served included deer, duck, geese, oysters, lobster, eel and fish. And rather than pumpkin pie, the pilgrims made stewed pumpkin at the first Thanksgiving feast.
- In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln officially declared Thanksgiving a national holiday at the urging of Sarah Josepha Hale, a writer who coined the classic song “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
- Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey to be the national bird, rather than the eagle. He deemed a turkey a “much more respectable bird” compared to the eagle.
- The iconic Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade celebrates its 90th parade this Thanksgiving.
- Football as a Thanksgiving tradition began when the NFL started the Thanksgiving Classic games in 1920. Since then, the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys have hosted games on Thanksgiving Day.
- Approximately 88 percent of Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving. That amounts to 46 million turkeys consumed!
- Thanksgiving Day is celebrated on the second Monday in October in Canada.
- Wild turkeys can run 20 miles per hour when they are scared.
- The average Thanksgiving turkey weighs 15 pounds, but the heaviest turkey on record, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, weighed 86 pounds.
Did you learn something new? However you spend your Thanksgiving Day, here’s to hoping it is a great one for you and your loved ones.
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