Fun Facts About Thanksgiving
After you eat the big Thanksgiving meal, you will probably be lounging in the living room with a full tummy.
To entertain those around you, you might share these 30 trivia facts about Thanksgiving.
- 1. Turkey wasn’t on the menu at the first Thanksgiving.
- 2. Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday on October 3, 1863.
- 3. The first Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621 as a harvest festival.
- 4. Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey to be the national bird.
- 5. Many people enjoy Thanksgiving leftovers more than the meal itself.
- 6. The pilgrims did not use forks. They used spoons, knives & their fingers.
- 7. A woman named Sarah Josepha Hale lobbied Congress for years to make Thanksgiving an official holiday.
- 8. The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924 featured animals from the Central Park Zoo.
- 9. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving is known as “Drinksgiving.”
- 10. There are 4 U.S. towns named Turkey: Texas, Arizona, Louisiana and North Carolina.
- 11. The Dallas Cowboys and the Detroit Lions have played the most games on Thanksgiving Day.
- 12. 1989 is the first year a president, (George H.W. Bush) officially pardoned a turkey.
- 13. The tradition of a football game being played on Thanksgiving began in 1876 with Princeton and Yale.
- 14. Female turkeys cackle. Only male turkeys actually gobble, which is why they are aptly named “gobblers”.
- 15. The average American consumes 229 grams of fat on this holiday.
- 16. Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year in America, with over 32 million participants.
- 17. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving is usually the worst day to travel.
- 18. You shouldn’t let your cooked turkey sit out for longer than two hours before refrigerating.
- 19. The largest turkey on record weighed 86 pounds (about the size of a 12-year-old)
- 20. Colchester, Connecticut, once cancelled Thanksgiving due to lack of pumpkin pie.
- 21. Black Friday is the busiest day of the year for plumbers.
- 22. Old Homestead Steakhouse in Manhattan served up the most expensive Thanksgiving dinner in 2019 which was a whopping $181,000.
- 23. Thanksgiving Eve is the biggest drinking & pizza night of the year.
- 24. Turkeys have heart attacks, but scientists aren’t sure why.
- 25. 50% of people put stuffing inside the turkey, although professional chefs advise against it.
- 26. Turkeys can run up to 25 mph.
- 27. Most people think you gain 5-10 pounds over Thanksgiving, but the average person only gains one pound.
- 28. Mashed potatoes is the most loved Thanksgiving dish.
- 29. Historians have no record of turkey being eaten at the first Thanksgiving.
- 30. Thanksgiving leftovers led to the first ever TV dinner. A Swanson employee accidentally ordered 260 tons of turkey for Thanksgiving in 1953. The solution was to sell all of that turkey as frozen dinners.
Happy belated Thanksgiving to Brenda and her followers. As a household of one I cherish my peaceful and quiet Thanksgiving Day. I caught glimpses of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV while lugging the artificial Christmas tree and other boxes of decor up from the basement. I got the tree assembled and worked on Christmas decor around the house. I’m not a fan of turkey but I love chicken so I had a quarter broasted chicken (bought the day before from the supermarket and re-heated in the microwave yesterday), made myself a baked potato in the microwave and loaded it up with sour cream, salt and butter, and had my favorite wine. No healthy food for me yesterday, HA! The New York Times had an article (I think it was Wednesday) about misconceptions and misrepresentations concerning the first Thanksgiving in what would become the USA that hit some of the points that Brenda noted, along with a brief history of how the day came to be a national holiday. To me it signals that Christmas season is officially upon us!
Interesting post…who knew!
I grew up in North Carolina & never knew there was a town called Turkey, NC..lol…living in Florida now on the SpaceCoast there is a very small town called Christmas, Florida….it only consists of a park, post office & one convenience store…people take their Christmas cards to that post office and get them meter stamped with Christmas Florida!
Happy 🦃 Thanksgiving Brenda! We had a quiet day with my Dad and came home before dark. Grabbed my fall decor off the mailbox and put up a winter wishes snowman sign right before dark. Anticipating cold weather starting tomorrow.
Guess I need to cackle when I write my friends on Thanksgiving. I have always used gobble, gobble, gobble.
Happy Thanksgiving, Brenda🦃. This was a fun post. We are having pasta carbonara for dinner as we’ve been under fire and high wind warnings and threat of losing power so no baking.
Happy Thangsgiving Brenda!
I enjoy your stories and the Thangsgiving facts is so interesting. #22 blew my mind! Can’t imagine spending that amount of money on a dinner; in my neck of the woods you could buy several acres of land and put up a house and a garage/shop!
I just put my pumpkin pie in the oven and sat down with a cuppa coffee and have my Brittany spaniel draped over my lap. Husband and I are having Chipotle Meatloaf with mashed Yukon Golds and fresh greenbeans this year. We are saving the turkey for New Years. In a bit, we are going to drive over to the new dog park. We are having a dry sunny Thanksgiving; rare for the Pacific Northwest. Tomorrow, I wistfully pack up my beautiful Fall (favorite season) and start with Christmas . We are traveling to Southern California in two weeks, so I can’t get too extravagant with decorating.
Wishing you a blessed Turkey day!
Happy Thanksgiving. Interesting post of facts! Have a blessed day.
Hi Brenda. I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving. I really enjoyed this post. It was so fun to read through everything. The dinner price blew me away. Who in their right mind would pay that?!! And it was interesting to learn about the frozen diners. That was a brilliant idea.