Thanksgiving Facts
Thanksgiving Facts
- 91% of Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving Day.
- Americans feast on 535 million pounds of turkey on Thanksgiving.
- Only male turkeys gobble. Females make a clicking noise. The famous gobble is actually a seasonal mating call.
- More than 40 million green bean casseroles are served on Thanksgiving.
- Twenty percent of cranberries eaten are eaten on Thanksgiving.
- Benjamin Franklin wanted the national bird to be a turkey.
- Thomas Jefferson thought the concept of Thanksgiving was the most ridiculous idea he had ever heard.
- Turkeys were one of the first animals in the Americas to be domesticated.
- Columbus thought that the land he discovered was connected to India, where peacocks are found in considerable number. And he believed turkeys were a type of peacock (they’re actually a type of pheasant). So he named them “tuka”, which is "peacock" in the Tamil language of India.
- During the first winter in 1621, half of the 102 pilgrims died. The following year resulted in a plentiful harvest. The pilgrims decided to celebrate with a feast (Thanksgiving) that would include 90 natives who helped the pilgrims survive during that first winter. The most famous indian was Squanto, who taught the pilgrims how to live off of this new land.
- The First Thanksgiving lasted for three days.
- Sarah Josepha Hale, a magazine editor, campaigned to make Thanksgiving a National Holiday in 1827 and succeeded when President Abraham Lincoln established our National Thanksgiving Day celebration in 1863.
- Every President since Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving Day. But in 1939, 1940, and 1941 Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed Thanksgiving the third Thursday in November to lengthen the holiday shopping season.
Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Football Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.
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