Thanksgiving is a day when many Americans gather together with family for an afternoon of food and football, but just how far do people travel to spend turkey day at Grandma’s house? Which state grows the most cranberries, and how big was the world’s largest pumpkin pie?
Discover the answer to these questions, as well as many more facts about popular Thanksgiving foods and traditions.
Thanksgiving Over the Years
First Thanksgiving Meal
Though many competing claims exist, the most familiar story of the first Thanksgiving took place in Plymouth Colony, in present-day Massachusetts, in 1621. More than 200 years later, President Abraham Lincoln declared the final Thursday in November as a national day of thanksgiving. Congress finally made Thanksgiving Day an official national holiday in 1941.
Did you know? Sarah Josepha Hale petitioned for a national Thanksgiving holiday for close to 40 years, believing that "Thanksgiving, like the Fourth of July, should be considered a national festival and observed by all our people."
Sarah Josepha Hale, the enormously influential magazine editor and author who waged a tireless campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday in the mid-19th century, was also the author of the classic nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
In 2001, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative Thanksgiving stamp. Designed by the artist Margaret Cusack in a style resembling traditional folk-art needlework, it depicted a cornucopia overflowing with fruits and vegetables, under the phrase “We Give Thanks.”
Thanksgiving Trivia
In Plymouth, Massachusetts, colonists and Wampanoag Indians shared an autumn harvest feast in 1621 that is widely acknowledged to be one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations. But some historians argue that Florida, not Massachusetts, may have been 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, the 800 Spanish settlers shared a festive meal with the native Timucuan people.
The first Thanksgiving meal in Plymouth probably had little in common with today’s traditional holiday spread. Although turkeys were indigenous, 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 (mussels, lobster, bass) plus the fruits of the first pilgrim harvest, including pumpkin. No mashed potatoes, though. Potatoes had only been recently shipped back to Europe from South America.
America first called for a national day of thanksgiving to celebrate victory over the British in the Battle of Saratoga. In 1789, George Washington again called for national day of thanks on the last Thursday of November in 1777 to commemorate the end of the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the Constitution. And during the Civil War, both the Confederacy and the Union issued Thanksgiving Day proclamations following major victories.
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, the Federalists, Jefferson believed in “a wall of separation between Church and State” and believed that endorsing such celebrations as president would amount to a state-sponsored religious worship.
The first official proclamation of a national Thanksgiving holiday didn’t come until 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln called for an annual Thanksgiving celebration on the final Thursday in November. The proclamation was the result of years of impassioned lobbying by "Mary Had a Little Lamb" author and abolitionist Sarah Josepha Hale.
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.
Cranberries were eaten by Native Americans and used 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 as Ocean Spray.
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, Smithsonian reports, 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.
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.
Starting in the 1940s, farmers would gift the president with some plump birds for roast turkey over the holidays, which the first family would invariably eat. While 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.”) the annual White House tradition of “pardoning” a turkey officially started with George H.W. Bush in 1989.
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.
To celebrate the expansion of its Herald Square superstore, Macy’s announced its very first “Big Christmas Parade” two weeks before Thanksgiving in 1924, promising “magnificent floats,” bands and an “animal circus.” A huge success, Macy’s trimmed the parade route from six miles to two miles and signed a TV contract with NBC to broadcast the now famous Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
In 1927, the first oversized balloons debuted in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. 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, and featured Felix the Cat and inflated animals.
Concerned that the Christmas shopping season was cut short by a late Thanksgiving, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt decreed in 1939 that Thanksgiving would be celebrated a week earlier. “Franksgiving,” as it was known, was decried by Thanksgiving traditionalists and political rivals (one even compared FDR to Hitler) and only adopted by 23 of the 48 states. Congress officially moved Thanksgiving back to the fourth Thursday of November in 1941, where it has remained ever since.
1 / 14: Credit: State Archives of Florida/Florida Memory
Thanksgiving on the Roads
The American Automobile Association (AAA) predicted that 54.6 million Americans will travel 50 miles or more from home over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in 2022.
Thanksgiving On the Table
According to the USDA, Minnesota is the top turkey-producing state in America, with a production total of 37.5 million in 2022. Six states—Minnesota, North Carolina, Arkansas, Indiana, Missouri and Virginia—account for 68 percent of the 212 million turkeys that will be raised in the U.S. in 2022.
The National Turkey Federation estimated that 46 million turkeys—one-fifth of the annual total of 235 million consumed in the United States—are eaten each year at Thanksgiving.
In a survey conducted by the National Turkey Federation, nearly 88 percent of Americans said they eat turkey at Thanksgiving. The cost of that turkey was higher in 2022, with the average retail price for a frozen turkey up 73 percent since April 2021.
Cranberry production in the U.S. is expected to reach 8.3 million (100-pound) barrels in 2022. Wisconsin, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington are the top cranberry growing states.
Illinois is the major pumpkin-growing state, producing 652 million pounds of pumpkin, out of a total of 2,186 million pounds grown in the United States in 2021, according to the USDA.
The sweet potato is most plentifully produced in North Carolina, which grew 1.83 billion pounds of the popular Thanksgiving side dish vegetable in 2021. Other sweet potato powerhouses include California and Mississippi, and the top-producing states together generated over 2.9 billion pounds of the tubers.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest pumpkin pie ever baked weighed 3,699 pounds and measured just over 20 feet long. It was prepared on September 25, 2010 by the New Bremen Giant Pumpkin Growers in Ohio, and included canned pumpkin, eggs, sugar, salt, pumpkin spice, cinnamon and evaporated milk. The crust required 440 sheets of dough.
Thanksgiving Around the Country
Three towns in the United States take their name from the traditional Thanksgiving bird, including Turkey, Texas (pop. 465); Turkey Creek, Louisiana (pop. 363); and Turkey, North Carolina (pop. 270).
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.
Quirky Vintage Photos from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
‘Andy the Alligator’ in the 1933 parade seems dwarfed in size compared to the balloons of today.
Mickey Mouse made his first debut in this 1934 parade. The original caption that ran in the NY Daily News for this photo read, the “parade was so large this year it took an hour to pass”.
According to the NY Daily News, this 1937 parade featured seven musical organizations, twenty-one floats and balloon units and 400 costumed marchers.
The Tin Man made his debut months after the release of “The Wizard of Oz” in 1939. This photo was taken from the sixth story of a Times Square building as the parade went past.
The crew prepare to erect the giant inflatable Macy’s clown for the Macy’s Parade in 1942.
It’s still tradition today for New Yorkers to watch the balloons being inflated and prepared the night before the big show.
An NBC camera set up to film the 1945 parade from a rooftop.
Kids were delighted by the clowns and costumes that walked along Central Park West at Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, 1949.
This helium-filled Space Cadet, coming in at 70 feet tall, was indicative of the newest adventure interests of America’s kids in 1952.
Not all animals were larger than life balloons. A group of elephants participated in the 1954 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Radio City Rockettes filled stockings on this 1958 parade float.
The Thanksgiving Turkey accompanied by a marching band make their way through Times Square, 1959.
It wouldn’t be the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade as we know it without a performance by the Rockettes, 1964.
1 / 13: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
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. He made his debut in 1968 and has appeared in over 40 parades since.
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.
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