Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is a well known American holiday. Here are some interesting tidbits about the holiday for you to enjoy.
Mankind has always been celebrating bountiful harvests in ceremonies similar to America’s Thanksgiving. These ceremonies were usually in conjunction with harvest festivals that celebrated the good crops and bountiful earth.
This year, Thanksgiving will be celebrated on November 27th, 2008.
The celebration that we know today as Thanksgiving was started in 1621 after the Pilgrim’s made it through the first year in the New World. They had a bountiful harvest and plenty of food to be shared and stored through the winter. They invited their Indian neighbors to join them and the meat they ate at that first Thanksgiving wasn’t turkey. It was salt packed fish and smoked meat. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday.
Did you know that:
- The drink that the Pilgrims brought with them from overseas was beer?
- The Pilgrims were taught how to cultivate the land they grew their food on from the Wampanoag Indians who lived near Plymouth, Massachusetts where the first Thanksgiving was held?
- The first Thanksgiving was attended by all of the Pilgrims that survived that harsh first year – about half that arrived in America – over ninety Wampanoag Indians and their chief Massasoit?
- The very first Thanksgiving celebration was three days long?
- American President Franklin D. Roosevelt made Thanksgiving the last Thursday in November as a way to help boost the economy in 1939?
- The cornucopia is a symbol of an abundant harvest that is now associated with Thanksgiving? A traditional cornucopia would be made out of a curved goat’s horn.
- The very first meal of ‘thanksgiving’ in North America was actually celebrated by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and the ‘Tejas’ Indians?
- Turkeys can have heart attacks? This interesting fact about the bird we enjoy during our Thanksgiving dinner was discovered during sound barrier test flights that were conducted by the Air Force. When a jet broke the sound barrier, the Turkey would have a heart attack and keel over dead.
- Archaeologists have found fossils of turkeys that date back 10 million years ago?
- Dungeness crab is sometimes used instead of turkey on the American West Coast because crab season opens in early November?
- If Ben Franklin had had his way America’s national bird would’ve been a Turkey? *Author’s note: If you have watched the popular musical ‘1776’ there is a song sung about this between Ben Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson.
- One turkey is pardoned by the President of the United States every year and is sent to live on a turkey farm safely for the rest of his days?