Thanksgiving is one of the more widely celebrated holidays in the United States. In giving thanks, here are intriguing facts, figures, and trivia you may not have known about the holiday we call Thanksgiving:
1.) If you wanted to visit every house in the U.S. for Thanksgiving, you would end up visiting 117 million houses.
2.) There are 3 places in the U.S. called Turkey, one each in Texas, North Carolina, and Louisiana.
3.) On average, a person will consume 4500 calories on Thanksgiving.
4.) Turkeys can drown if they look up when it is raining.
5.) The state with the most turkey production in the United States is Minnesota.
6.) Every year, the President pardons a turkey. That turkey will not be eaten and will live peacefully.
7.) On Thanksgiving alone, between 530-680 million pounds of turkey is eaten by Americans.
8.) The first meal eaten by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong on the Moon was roasted turkey (in a food packet of course).
9.) Thanksgiving was declared an official national holiday in 1941 and signed into federal law, fixed to the fourth Thursday of every November.
10.) The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was held in 1924 and the first character balloon was Felix the Cat three years later.
11.) While Thanksgiving is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November in the U.S., it is celebrated on the second Monday of October in Canada.
12.) The monetary value of all the turkeys eaten in the U.S. is around $4.5 billion.
13.) Cranberries are native to the Americas.
14.) The first official Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621.
15.) Thanksgiving counts for 1/6th of the amount of total turkeys eaten during the year.
16.) Sarah Hale, composer of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, is credited as pushing Thanksgiving through as a national day of celebration. She wrote to 5 presidents until Abraham Lincoln finally declared the fourth Thursday of November a national day of thanksgiving.
17.) Wild turkeys can fly up to a speed of 55 mph.
18.) The biggest turkey on record was a whopping 86 pounds!!
19.) The NFL’s Dallas Cowboys and Detroit Lions host a game on Thanksgiving every year.
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