Featured Photo by SJ 📸 on Unsplash

Happy Thanksgiving to our American friends. As it’s Trivia Thursday, I thought you might enjoy some trivia about the holiday.

1. Pretty much everything we know about the first Thanksgiving was written in a letter by a colonist named Edward Winslow. Written to someone he refers to as a “Loving, and old Friend,” the letter is quite lengthy and he touches on Thanksgiving only briefly.
2. Thanksgiving has been around for a long time. In fact, George Washington issued the first presidential proclamation of a Thanksgiving celebration in 1789. Other presidents followed in his footsteps issuing proclamations of their own. For decades, Thanksgiving was held on various dates, until Abraham Lincoln proclaimed it should be celebrated the last Thursday of November in 1863. In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the date up a week earlier; however, many states refused to play along. In 1941, Congress stepped in and passed a resolution setting a fixed date for Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of the second-to-last month.
3. Thomas Jefferson refused to declare a Thanksgiving proclamation. Since previous presidents had declared Thanksgiving to be a day of fasting, prayer, and gratitude, Jefferson felt the holiday inappropriately crossed the boundary separating church and state.
4. Macy’s has been holding its annual Thanksgiving Day parade since 1924. In addition to floats with nursery rhyme characters like Mother Goose and Little Miss Muffet, the inaugural parade also included real bears, monkeys, elephants, and other animals on loan from the Central Park Zoo. In 1927 the animals were replaced with giant balloon characters because their frightened growls scared the children.
5. No Thanksgiving trivia would be complete without a story about pumpkin pie. In 1705, the town of Colchester, Connecticut was so dedicated to the dessert that they elected to postpone the holiday because foul weather had interfered with their molasses shipment. Without molasses, they couldn’t make pumpkin pie and without pumpkin pie, Thanksgiving just wouldn’t be the same.
6. If your family Thanksgiving meal traditionally includes side dishes like mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, you might be surprised to know that they weren’t served at the first Thanksgiving. In fact, potatoes weren’t grown in North America yet and cranberry sauce wouldn’t be invented for 50 more years. What was most likely on the first Thanksgiving menu? Indigenous foods like lobster, swan, mussels, venison, and corn porridge.
7. Another piece of Thanksgiving trivia you may not know is that the holiday isn’t just celebrated in the United States. Canada celebrates Thanksgiving, too. Canadians, however, celebrate in October, offering thanks for a safe voyage that took place more than 40 years before the Mayflower crossing.
8. If you’re in the habit of braving the stores on Black Friday, there’s a group of people you’re not likely to see in the crowds: plumbers. It turns out that enough people clog their sinks and garbage disposals on Thanksgiving to make it the busiest day of the year for plumbers.
9. If you’ve got a question about your Thanksgiving turkey, the Butterball Turkey Hotline is at your service. Each year, their experts take over 100,000 calls about turkey preparation during November and December. Some of the questions they receive are hilarious!
10. In 1953, the folks at Swanson didn’t sell as many Thanksgiving turkeys as expected. In fact, they had over 260 tons of unsold turkey on hand. Inspired by the meals served in trays on airplanes, Swanson salesperson Gerry Thompson used the turkeys to create the world’s first TV dinners. They sold for 98¢ each. These ready-made meals were an immediate hit and Thompson was given a $1,000 bonus for coming up with the idea, the equivalent of five months’ salary.

I wish everyone the very best, happiest, most enjoyable day.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash