Happy Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is a truly American Holiday that we ccelebrate on the fourth Thursday in November every year. It has been an official holiday in the United States since 1863, when Abraham Lincoln declared it a national holiday. Even though the Civil War was still raging, Lincoln believed that people should take this one day and be thankful.
It quickly carved out it’s place with all of the other major holidays, New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, The Fourth of July, Labor Day and Christmas.
The First Thanksgiving
Anyone who went to virtually any school in this country knows that Thanksgiving began, all be it unofficially, with the Pilgrims. Here is a brief account that tells the tail. The First Thanksgiving was a way for the earliest settlers to the New World, to give thanks to God for guiding them safely across the ocean. The year was 1621, and it was a harvest celebration as well. The feast was attended by both European Settlers and Native Americans, and was an early display of cooperation, that unfortunately did not set the tone for the rest of the colonization of America. Historic Native Americans, Squanto and Massasoit attended this celebration. This was continued in later years, first as an impromptu religious observance, and later as a civil tradition, until Lincoln made it an official holiday.
Thanksgiving On the Roads
The American Automobile Association (AAA) estimated that 42.2 million Americans traveled 50 miles or more from home over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in 2010.
Thanksgiving Table Statistics
The U.S. Census Bureau states that Minnesota is the state that produces the most turkeys in America. It is estimated that they will provide about 46.5 million turkeys in 2011. There will be about 248 million turkeys raised in the U.S. this year, with Minnesota, North Carolina, Arkansas, Missouri, Virginia and Indiana accounting for the majority of the birds.
The National Turkey Federation, (yes, there is one.) estimates that about 1/5th of all turkeys consumed in the United States in a given year are eaten at Thanksgiving.
Those wizards at the National Turkey Federation, conducted a survey in which they learned that almost 88 % of Americans proudly claimed they eat turkey at Thanksgiving. They went on to inform us that the average turkey weighs 15 lbs. Which by their very strict calculations means Americans consume an approximate total of 690 Million pounds of Turkey! No wonder our country has an obesity problem.
When it comes to cranberries the United States doesn’t shy away from consumption. Our most ardent cranberry producing states, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington produce 750 million pounds of cranberries for production in 2011.
We can’t leave pumpkins out to the mix here. Illinois, California, Pennsylvania and New York are the main pumpkin producing states, it was estimated that last year they produced 1.1 billion pounds of pumpkins for our Thanksgiving Day feast.
The sweet potato is most plentifully produced in North Carolina, which grew 972 million pounds of the popular Thanksgiving side dish vegetable in 2010. Other sweet potato powerhouses included California and Mississippi, and the top producing states together generated over 2.4 billion pounds of the tubers.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest pumpkin pie ever baked weighed 2,020 pounds and measured just over 12 feet long. It was baked on October 8, 2005 by the New Bremen Giant Pumpkin Growers in Ohio, and included 900 pounds of pumpkin, 62 gallons of evaporated milk, 155 dozen eggs, 300 pounds of sugar, 3.5 pounds of salt, 7 pounds of cinnamon, 2 pounds of pumpkin spice and 250 pounds of crust.
Thanksgiving Across the United States
Football has always been a tradition on Thanksgiving and the Detroit Lions have been featured since 1934 with the short World War II break from 139-1945, but they played every Thanksgiving since then. The first televised Lions Thanksgiving game was broadcast in 1956, and we all relax and watch all zonked out on turkey every year. The Dallas Cowboys are the other traditional Turkey Day Team, that grace our air waves. It is only appropriate that America’s Team should play on America’s Holiday. How grateful can we be for that?
Thanksgiving Parades and Football
Originally known as Macy’s Christmas Parade—to signify the launch of the Christmas shopping season—the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade took place in New York City in 1924. It was launched by Macy’s employees and featured animals from the Central Park Zoo. Today, some 3 million people attend the annual parade and another 44 million watch it on television.
Tony Sarg, a children’s book illustrator and puppeteer, designed the first giant hot air balloons for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1927. He later created the elaborate mechanically animated window displays that grace the façade of the New York store from Thanksgiving to Christmas.
Snoopy has appeared as a giant balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade more times than any other character in history. As the Flying Ace, Snoopy made his sixth appearance in the 2006 parade.
The first time the Detroit Lions played football on Thanksgiving Day was in 1934, when they hosted the Chicago Bears at the University of Detroit stadium, in front of 26,000 fans. The NBC radio network broadcast the game on 94 stations across the country–the first national Thanksgiving football broadcast. Since that time, the Lions have played a game every Thanksgiving (except between 1939 and 1944); in 1956, fans watched the game on television for the first time.
