5 Little-known Thanksgiving Facts to Munch On This Year With Your Family

It’s Thanksgiving again! It is a time to gorge on copious amounts of side dishes and pies, awkwardly dodge familial conversational land mines, and, of course, let’s not forget to be thankful for all we have received this year.

Thanksgiving is a fun time to panic over who to invite and who not to invite. It’s a time to run to every grocery store within 50 miles, hoping to find just the right breadcrumbs for the stuffing, and inevitably ruin the gravy.

Then, of course, dealing with the Uncle who drinks too much is always tricky. You can’t not invite him, but you really, deep down, don’t want to invite him, so tap dancing around that trainwreck to keep loudmouth Uncle Rick occupied elsewhere is a Turkey Trot in and of itself!

Now that I have sufficiently raised your blood pressure, let’s bring it down with a few random Thanksgiving fun facts to toss out at the dinner table when your socialist commie-loving cousin starts arguing the positive merits of gender theory and universal income.

It should be in October

Historians believe the first Thanksgiving didn’t happen in November, but the month prior in October. Not only did the first Thanksgiving likely not occur in November, but they also probably didn’t eat turkey.

Instead, some 50 Pilgrims and 90 Wampanoag Indians more than likely dined on ducks, geese, and swans. This first get-together in 1621 was also a whole festival for the harvest, lasting three days.

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Just think, you could be spending a whole three days overeating and feeling bad about yourself thanks to the passive-aggressive comments from your elderly Aunt on how little you’ve accomplished in your life compared to her children. I’ll stick to just one day; thank you very much.

Our Thanksgiving is in November thanks to President Abraham Lincoln, who set the date in November to coincide with the Pilgrim’s landing on Plymouth Rock. Which brings me to the following fun fact…

Good old Mom

President Lincoln’s idea to declare a national holiday for Thanksgiving was thanks to the persistence of a woman named Sarah Josepha Hale. Sarah is sometimes called the “Mother of Thanksgiving” because it was due to her letters over the years pleading for the creation of a national holiday for Thanksgiving that we share in this special time today.

Her letter to Honest Abe resonated as her argument was that it would allow the nation to heal from the trauma caused by the Civil War.

She wrote it would be a day to:

“…offer to God our tribute of joy and gratitude for the blessings of the year.”

She also wrote the classic headbanger Mary Had a Little Lamb. Good ole’ Sarah had a way with words for sure. 

While you sit around the table this year, instead of thinking about the food you are going to take a hard pass on (for instance, the neighbor’s sketchy whipped cream Jell-O salad dish), you should instead focus on how thankful you are to live in a country where Jell-O can be a staple dish on the dining room table.

Choke it down

My favorite fun fact is the hard truth that most of the family members smiling and expressing their love of all the food actually don’t like what they shovel into their munching caves each year. According to a 2019 Instacart survey, 68% of Americans dislike traditional Thanksgiving dishes but eat them anyway.

According to another survey, the three most hated dishes are cranberry sauce, candied yams, and green bean casserole. Growing up, green bean casserole was always my favorite, but as an adult, I can sympathize with the 25% in this survey who don’t care for it; it does tend to take on the consistency of snot if you don’t eat it when it’s piping hot.

My favorite is the canned sauce; I won’t even bother with homemade…no Sir, not on my hot buns. 

That’s a lot of poop

This following fun fact makes me feel bad for pooper scoopers. The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade didn’t have balloons.

Instead, it had live animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo. In 1924, a parade of monkeys, bears, camels, and elephants made their way through New York City, undoubtedly dropping little to large smelly gifts all along the way.

So I suppose it’s similar to how the city smells now. This continued until 1927, when the parade changed to balloons, not because of the abundance of poop, but because the animals scared the kids.

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I get that; monkeys freak me out, too, ever since I saw the movie Outbreak. The best part of this fun fact is that from 1927 until 1932, the balloons were just let go at the end of the parade, and if you found a popped balloon and returned it to Macy’s, you g0t $100.

I miss the days of reckless abandon when we cared so little for safety and the environment. 

Just like chicken

Last but not least, I’ll leave you with this fun fact. President Calvin Coolidge once pardoned a Thanksgiving raccoon instead of a Thanksgiving Turkey. 

Yup, Thanksgiving Trash Panda got a presidential pardon. A woman in Mississippi had gifted the President the raccoon to eat for Thanksgiving.

The President and First Lady didn’t find the idea of eating a raccoon appealing, so he pardoned the animal. The Coolidge’s were well known as animal lovers and adopted the raccoon as a presidential pet, which wasn’t all that strange at the time given that they already had a pet bear and pet lion cubs.

Rebecca, the White House raccoon, would walk with President Coolidge on the White House grounds wearing a leash and even curl up on his lap in the evenings. That’s one lucky little DC trash bandit. 

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Happy Thanksgiving!