THANKSGIVING TRIVIA

From Town & Country Magazine, here are some Thanksgiving Facts that, looked at from a particular viewpoint, are actually pretty sad:
– The menu for the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth in 1621 likely included lobster, seal, and swans. This is generally what the Pilgrims were eating at the time.
– A woman named Sarah Josepha Hale lobbied Congress for years to make Thanksgiving an official holiday. She began her quest in 1827, hoping to make it “permanently, an American custom and institution.” It wasn’t until 1863 that President Lincoln finally declared Thanksgiving a national holiday, in the middle of the Civil War, perhaps hoping to bring the country together.
– There isn’t clear historical information on the actual date of the first Thanksgiving, but some historians have suggested it may have taken place in mid-October. President Lincoln assigned the holiday to fall on the last Thursday in November, possibly to coincide with the date the Pilgrims first landed the Mayflower in New England.
– In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving one week earlier, hoping to lengthen the holiday shopping season.
– The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924 featured live animals – bears, elephants, camels, and monkeys from the Central Park Zoo (* I had no idea the Pilgrims rode camels).
– Thanksgiving leftovers led to the first ever TV dinner. In 1953, food corporation Swanson overestimated how much turkey would be consumed on Thanksgiving and ended up with 260 tons of leftover poultry. Using 5,000 aluminum trays and an assembly line of hand-packers, they created a Thanksgiving-inspired meal with turkey, cornbread dressing, gravy, peas, and sweet potatoes. The dinner was sold for a grand total of 98 cents, and in the first full year of production, they sold ten million of them.
– Thanksgiving Day football games began in the 1870s. Football wasn’t even a professional sport when the Thanksgiving game tradition started. In 1876, Yale played Princeton in the first ever Thanksgiving Day football match.
– Female turkeys don’t gobble. They purr and cackle.
* The tradition of men loosening their belts after Thanksgiving dinner began with the heaviest president, William Howard Taft, who, some years, had to completely take his pants off.
* I suddenly feel so woked.
* Tell Aunt Irene to forget the sweet potatoes with marshmallows, and to bring a cooked seal. Although the marshmallows would still be a nice touch.