It’s that special time of year again -- time for football, family and ridiculous amounts of food. Oh, and it’s also the time to give thanks for football, family and food. Especially football.
Once you’ve put away that last bite of turkey and loosened your belt a few notches, I'm sure you'll have a tiny bit of room to ingest some Thanksgiving knowledge:
1. The first Thanksgiving was a harvest feast in Plymouth, Mass. It's widely acknowledged that in 1621, Pilgrims from the Mayflower broke bread with local Native Americans -- the Wampanoag Indians, to be exact. This three-day feast later became known as Thanksgiving. Everyone knows this one, right?
What some folks may not know:
- The only documentation of that feast comes from two brief passages from the Pilgrim chronicler Edward Winslow.
And... - The second Thanksgiving celebration was held in 1623 to mark the end of a long drought.
2. Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving a holiday. Lincoln must have loved him some turkey, because in October 1863 he made the fourth Thursday in November a national holiday.
He probably clocks in as America’s second-greatest turkey-lover, right behind Ben Franklin, who tried to make the turkey our national bird. If that had happened, maybe we’d be eating bald eagle every November.
In 1939, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to move Thanksgiving to the third Thursday in November. He hoped the move would help retail sales during the Great Depression -- the start of the tradition? When that didn't fly, he conceded and signed a bill making Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday of the month.
But the aforementioned presidents weren’t the only people to have a major impact on Thanksgiving…
3. The author of “Mary had a Little Lamb” helped make Thanksgiving possible. Sarah Josepha Hale, an American writer and editor, campaigned to make Thanksgiving a national holiday for 36 years. Lincoln heeded her request in 1863 (see #2).
And yeah, she also wrote “Mary had a Little Lamb.”
4. In the United States, folks eat around 46 million turkeys each year at Thanksgiving. According to the National Turkey Federation, 244 million turkeys were raised in 2010, and roughly one-fifth of those were eaten in one day -- and possibly in sandwiches over the following few days as well.
Ninety-one percent of Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving Day, and the average weight of a Turkey Day turkey is 15 pounds.
There is hope for a few turkeys, however. Each year -- since the mid-20th century -- the president has “pardoned” one or two Thanksgiving turkeys. The forever-grateful birds are then sent to a farm to live out their days in retirement.
5. The Detroit Lions are as Thanksgiving as cranberry sauce. The first time the Lions played on Thanksgiving Day was in 1934 -- seven years before Congress passed the law that made it a national holiday (before that, the decree came from the president).
Since ’34, there have been only five occasions that the Lions did not play on Thanksgiving. In fact, they’ve been playing on Thanksgiving before games were even televised, which began in 1956.
I’m no Lions fan, but I’ll be watching, and eating, and giving thanks today.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Author’s Note: Information provided by history.com.
As an example, take the Ten Commandments. (Everyone believes in them, though no one knows what they are.) There are two totally different accounts of them in the Bible. One account occurs in Exodus 20 (and is repeated, differently, in Deuteronomy). A totally different account--the only one actually called the Ten Commandments--is outlined in Exodus 34. Or the Civil War. Was it a battle between states rights vs. a strong federal government, or a conflict between an industrial region (and its needs) vs. an agricultural region and its needs, or a war over slavery? Recent research has even challenged the validity of the strongest evidence in criminal trials--the eye-witness account. We create a Moses and a Jesus and a Washington and a Lincoln and a Martin Luther King to fit our own spiritual and political conceptions. We have no idea what any of them were like. Even Thanksgiving, our original topic, is seen by some as a historical holiday, by others as a religious holiday, and by still others as the gateway to Christmas shopping. It's human nature to make things up. And it's human nature to think that what we make up is true and what others believe to be true is just made up.
But these are not historical narratives. They're stories. We're really talking about the illusive nature of history. Al--I don't have an "objective" point. I have only a subjective point. The difference between the two is what we're talking about.
Thanksgiving could be one of our less rediculous holidays and it is fun to get together with family and friends to eat a good meal. Nothing better than pie for dessert.
The Romans were the ones who really spread the apple around, especially to Brittania, from whence it travelled to our shores, sinless.