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I’ve been working on an article for one of the newsletters that I help manage at work. It’s a collection of interesting facts about Thanksgiving. I find them incredibly fascinating. You might as well, so I thought I would share some with you.

Thanksgiving Tidbits

Contrary to popular belief, the first Thanksgiving was not on Plymouth Rock with pilgrims and turkey. It was on September 8, 1565 in what is now known as Saint Augustine, Florida, as six hundred Spanish settlers landed and had a mass of Thanks, followed by a huge meal and some football.

Canadians refer to American Thanksgiving as ‘Yanksgiving,’ in order to distinguish between our Thanksgivings and theirs.

Originating during the Truman administration, every year the President pardons a turkey presented by the National Turkey Federation. The pardoned turkey is flown first-class (so much for budget cuts) from D.C. to Los Angeles, where it becomes the Grand Marshal of Disneyland’s annual Thanksgiving Day parade. The other turkey…gets eaten.

Over ten million Americans today trace their ancestory back to the Mayflower. Some famous descendants are: Dane Cook, George W. Bush, Marilyn Monroe, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Seth McFarlane, Warren Buffet, and Amelia Earhardt.

Those Pilgrims had some crazy names. Among the travelers on the Mayflower and their next generation, there was Fear Brewster, Remember Allerton, Love Brewster (that’s a guy’s name), Wrestling Brewster (those Brewsters…), Hester le Mahieu, Oceanus Hopkins, Degory Priest, Humility Cooper, Resolved and Peregrine White (Peregrine was also the first child born to the Pilgrims in the New World).

Turkeys can drown if they look up while it’s raining.

The first female character to appear as a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was Olive Oyl in 1982.

The Detroit Lions have held a Thanksgiving Day game since 1934, with the exception of 1939-1944, due to World War II.

Before Thanksgiving was an official holiday, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the date up one week, so that merchants would have an extra week to sell Christmas stock, thus stimulating the economy. This angered a lot of people, since it was sort of last minute. They referred to this third Thursday celebration as ‘Franksgiving.’

Mankind has celebrated some sort of Thanksgiving or harvest festival for a really long time. One such festival, celebrated by the Romans, was called Cerelia, for the goddess of corn, Ceres. We, also celebrate Ceres every morning over a big bowl of Lucky Charms, as we get the word cereal from her name.

The highest consumption of turkey per capita is Israel, with a whopping 27 lbs.

We all know that Benjamin Franklin wanted to make the turkey the national bird. Legend has it that Thomas Jefferson thought that this was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard and opposed Franklin voraciously. It is believed that Ben then named the male turkey ‘tom,’ to spite Jefferson.