Thanksgiving is among America’s most beloved national holidays, but its early history is a muddled affair. Even the details of the famous feast between the Plymouth Colony settlers and the Wampanoag Native Americans in November 1621 are sketchy.
The best account we have of that event is a letter from English settler Edward Winslow that never mentions the word “Thanksgiving” but tells of a multiday harvest celebration that included a three-day banquet with King Massasoit and 90 Wampanoag men “so we might after a more special manner rejoice together.”
Over the centuries, that briefly mentioned feast has taken on a life of its own, with each generation adding its own take on the celebration of gratitude. These days, Thanksgiving revolves around food, family, friends, and fun. Below, please find some little-known Thanksgiving trivia so you have something to talk—or argue—about at the table this November.
THE HISTORY OF THANKSGIVING
Although Thanksgiving celebrations dated back to the first European settlements in America, it was not until the 1860s that Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday of November to be a national holiday.
WHERE WAS THE FIRST THANKSGIVING?
Colonists and the Wampanoag tribe shared an autumn harvest feast in 1621 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, which is widely acknowledged as one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations. But some historians argue that Florida, not Massachusetts, might be the true site of the first Thanksgiving in North America.
In 1565, nearly 60 years before Plymouth, a Spanish fleet came ashore and planted a cross in the sandy beach to christen the new settlement of St. Augustine. To celebrate the arrival and give thanks for God’s providence, the 800 Spanish settlers shared a festive meal with the native Timucuan people.
WHAT DID THEY EAT AT THE FIRST THANKSGIVING?
The Thanksgiving meal in Plymouth probably had little in common with today’s traditional holiday spread. Although turkeys are an indigenous species, there’s no record of a big, roasted bird at the feast.
The Wampanoag brought deer, and there would have been lots of local seafood, like mussels, lobster, and bass, plus the fruits of the first Pilgrim harvest, including pumpkin. No mashed potatoes, though: Potatoes had only recently been shipped back to Europe from South America.
WHEN WAS THE FIRST NATIONAL THANKSGIVING?
Local Thanksgiving celebrations took root, especially in New England, in the years after the first Thanksgiving. Then, in 1777, the Continental Congress called for a national day of Thanksgiving—to be held on December 18—to celebrate victory over the British in the Battle of Saratoga.
Not yet an established national holiday, Thanksgiving days were held sporadically over the next several decades. Presidents often announced such observances during or after major battles.
In 1789, George Washington called for a national day of thanks on the last Thursday of November to commemorate the end of the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the Constitution. During the Civil War, both the Confederacy and the Union issued Thanksgiving Day proclamations following major victories.
WHICH PRESIDENT REFUSED TO RECOGNIZE THANKSGIVING?
Thomas Jefferson was famously the only Founding Father and early president who refused to declare days of thanksgiving and fasting in the United States. Unlike his political rivals in the Federalist Party, the Democratic-Republican believed in “a wall of separation between Church and State” and thought endorsing such celebrations as president would amount to a state-sponsored religious worship.
WHY WE EAT TURKEY ON THANKSGIVING
Turkey likely wasn’t served at the first Thanksgiving in 1621, but it became a featured dish thanks to an 1827 novel by Sarah Josepha Hale set in a fictionalized New England community, notable for its detailed description of a traditional Thanksgiving feast with roast turkey at the head of the table.
THANKSGIVING BECOMES A HOLIDAY
Early Puritans observed Thanksgiving days of prayer, but Sarah Josepha Hale’s crusade is what ultimately gave us the Thanksgiving holiday.
WHEN DID THANKSGIVING BECOME A NATIONAL HOLIDAY?
President Abraham Lincoln kickstarted the annual tradition of Thanksgiving across America in 1863. He also set the precedent for the holiday’s original timing on the final Thursday in November.
WHO IS THE “MOTHER OF THANKSGIVING”?
Lincoln’s proclamation might not have happened without Sarah Josepha Hale. For decades, the prominent writer and magazine editor from New Hampshire led an impassioned campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday. She believed that such a unifying measure could help ease growing tensions in the lead-up to the Civil War. Her successful efforts earned her the nickname the “Mother of Thanksgiving.”
WHICH PRESIDENT MOVED THE DATE OF THANKSGIVING?
Concerned that the Christmas shopping season would be cut short by a late Thanksgiving, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decreed in 1939 that Thanksgiving would be celebrated a week earlier on the fourth out of five Thursdays that November. “Franksgiving,” as it was known, was decried by Thanksgiving traditionalists and political rivals (one even compared FDR to Hitler) and refused by 23 of the 48 states.
Undeterred, Roosevelt stuck with his early Thanksgiving date in 1940 and 1941 but moved to revert the holiday to its original timing on the final Thursday of November starting in 1942. Before that could happen, Congress officially scheduled Thanksgiving to fall on the third Thursday in November, which has remained the holiday’s date ever since.
HOW LONG HAS PUMPKIN PIE BEEN A TRADITIONAL PART OF THANKSGIVING?
Pumpkin pie was a staple on New England Thanksgiving tables as far back as the turn of the 18th century. Legend has it that the Connecticut town of Colchester postponed its Thanksgiving feast for a week in 1705 due to a molasses shortage. There could simply be no Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie.
WHEN DID WE START CANNING CRANBERRIES?
Native Americans ate cranberries and used them as a potent red dye, but sweetened cranberry relish was almost certainly not on the first Thanksgiving table. The Pilgrims had long exhausted their sugar supply by November 1621. Marcus Urann canned the first jellied cranberry sauce in 1912 and eventually founded the cranberry growers’ cooperative known today as Ocean Spray.
WHAT INVENTION WAS SPARKED BY A GLUT OF THANKSGIVING TURKEY?
In 1953, an employee at C.A. Swanson & Sons overestimated demand for Thanksgiving turkey, and the company was left with some 260 tons of extra frozen birds.
As a solution, a Swanson salesman ordered 5,000 aluminum trays, devised a turkey meal and recruited an assembly line of workers to compile what would become the first TV tray dinners. A culinary hit was born. In the first full year of production, 1954, the company sold 10 million turkey TV tray dinners.
WHO WAS THE FIRST PRESIDENT TO PARDON A TURKEY?
Starting in the 1940s, turkey farmers gifted the president some plump birds for the holidays, which the first family would invariably eat. President John F. Kennedy was the first American president to spare a turkey’s life. “We’ll just let this one grow,” JFK quipped in 1963. “It’s our Thanksgiving present to him.” However, the annual White House tradition of “pardoning” a turkey officially started with George H.W. Bush in 1989.
WHY IS FOOTBALL A THANKSGIVING TRADITION?
The winning combo of football and Thanksgiving kicked off way before there was anything called the NFL. The first Thanksgiving football game was a college match between Yale and Princeton in 1876, only 13 years after Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday.
Soon after, Thanksgiving was picked for the date of the college football championships. By the 1890s, thousands of college and high school football rivalries were played every Thanksgiving.
HOW THE NFL POPULARIZED THANKSGIVING DAY FOOTBALL
WHICH PRESIDENT RECEIVED A RACCOON AS A THANKSGIVING GIFT?
In 1926, President Calvin Coolidge received a somewhat odd Thanksgiving gift in the form of a live raccoon. Meant to be eaten (the Mississippi man who sent it called raccoon meat “toothsome”), the Coolidge family adopted the pet and named it Rebecca.
Rebecca was only the latest addition to their already substantial White House menagerie that included a black bear, a wallaby, and a pygmy hippo named Billy.
HOW DID THE MACY’S THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE START?
To celebrate the expansion of its Herald Square superstore, Macy’s announced its very first “Christmas Parade” two weeks before Thanksgiving in 1924. The department store promised “magnificent floats,” bands and an “animal circus.”
A huge success, Macy’s trimmed the parade route from its original six miles (today it is 2.5 miles) and signed a TV contract with NBC to broadcast the now-famous Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
WHEN DID THE MACY’S THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE START FEATURING BALLOONS?
The first oversized balloons—featuring Felix the Cat and inflated animals like elephants, tigers, and a giant hummingbird—debuted in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1927, replacing live zoo animals that grew agitated when paraded before thousands of noisy merry-makers.
The balloons were the brainchild of Anthony Frederick Sarg, a German-born puppeteer and theatrical designer who also created Macy’s fantastical Christmas window displays. The first balloons were filled with oxygen, not helium.
