"Thanksgiving Day. Let us all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks now...but the turkeys"
~Mark Twain

Happy Thanksgiving! How did we get here already? Wasn’t it just summer a minute ago?

As holidays go, I’ve always loved Thanksgiving. The last bits of fall color clinging to the trees, the sunsets taking on a vibrant late afternoon winter glow, the fresh chill in the air scented with wood smoke and of course…the food!

I’m a kitchen girl – always cooking, baking or fermenting something – so naturally Thanksgiving and the holiday season kickoff is when my culinary activities kick into high gear. I don’t cook a whole Thanksgiving dinner. We always gather at my parents house. My family takes a collaborative approach, each household contributing something. My contributions are always pies, cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes. For the last several years, cinnamon rolls on Thanksgiving morning for Luke have also become tradition – always to be enjoyed while watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

It’s usually a quiet day that ends with a boisterous dinner at my parents home with my family – a mix of parents, brothers, a couple of in-laws, nephews and my Luke. I’m more of the quiet type so I usually keep to my natural habitat – the kitchen – and I’m content enough just watching the happy chaos around me.

This year, Thanksgiving and the holiday season will feel different for us. Someone will be missing from our table. But we will gather anyway and face our new normal of one less boisterous voice in our little crowd.

So, in an effort to keep the warm feelings of the holiday going, and being the slightly nerdy girl that I am (okay, maybe a bit more than slightly nerdy), I started reading about both the historic and quirky facts about Thanksgiving.

Most of us are familiar with the story of the “First Thanksgiving” which was a harvest feast shared by the pilgrims and the indigenous people local to the area near Plymouth, Massachusetts in the early 17th century. This is grade school stuff – how many of us made pilgrim hats and paper turkeys out of construction paper and glue sticks and either participated in a Thanksgiving inspired school play or had a special Thanksgiving school lunch – or both?

Here’s the real story in a nutshell, or a close approximation anyway. The Plymouth settlers (pilgrims) and the indigenous people did gather for a feast at the end of harvest time in around 1621. This gathering was not referred to as “Thanksgiving” nor was it an annual event. The first Thanksgiving was actually a three-day feast attended by over 100 people – a combination of members of the Wampanoag tribe and English settlers. This feast was in part to celebrate a previously brokered peace treaty between the two groups and also the success of a prosperous growing season.

The attendees likely participated in games such as foot-races and marksmanship challenges and of course, stuffed themselves with a lot of food. While turkey was present on the groaning board, it was not the headliner! It was likely that venison was the main attraction.

According to written records, Massasoit, the leader of the Wampanoag, provided five deer to the feast. There were also ducks, geese, fish and, yes – wild turkeys.

(If you’d like to dig a bit deeper into the origins of Thanksgiving, click here.)

Over the next 200 years or so, Thanksgiving celebrations evolved into an annual event and were commemorated regionally in different ways and at different times between October and December. It did not become a national annual holiday until 1863. Sarah Josepha Hale AKA The Mother of Thanksgiving, wrote a letter to President Abraham Lincoln petitioning to make Thanksgiving a national holiday – it was her intention and wish that the holiday would help to heal and unify the nation after the traumatic Civil War.

These days Thanksgiving is still about gathering of family and friends, a lot of food both traditional and cultural, as well as the official kickoff of the Christmas season, crazy Black Friday shopping and all things sparkle and lights.

Thanksgiving also has a fun little trove of quirky facts…

The Macy's parade...with zoo animals?!
The first Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade was held in New York City in 1924. The first parade was called the Macy's Christmas Parade and featured Mother Goose inspired parade floats and store employees dressed as clowns, cowboys and sword-wielding knights. There were also marching bands and, instead of the ginormous floating balloons we are all so familiar with...the parade featured live animals on loan from the Central Park Zoo - a menagerie of camels, elephants, bears and monkeys! The giant balloons would not replace the menagerie until 1927 - much to the relief of the zoo animals.

The "other white meat" that never really took off...
Some have been known to dine on raccoon on Thanksgiving as their main course (I hear it tastes like chicken!). In 1926, President Calvin Coolidge was gifted a live raccoon by Vinnie Joyce of Nitta Yuma, Mississippi - intended for his Thanksgiving dinner at the White House. President Coolidge decided that the little "Trash Panda" was too cute to eat and instead adopted her as a pet, naming her Rebecca. She lived on and roamed the White House grounds at her leisure for the remainder of Coolidge's term.

Airplane food becomes chic...
We can thank Thanksgiving for the invention of the iconic TV Dinner. In 1953, the Swanson company grossly overestimated how many turkeys consumers would buy and ended up with 260 tons of extra turkey! Inspired by the meal trays served on airliners, a Swanson employee came up with the ingenious idea of creating and selling individually frozen turkey dinners complete with cornbread stuffing, gravy, peas, and sweet potatoes on reheatable trays. This idea was a big hit and was the beginning of the prosperous TV Dinner industry.

"Dashing Through the Snow"...to Thanksgiving dinner?
And last but not least, A very popular and widely known song was written expressly for Thanksgiving - but these days, almost no one thinks of turkeys when they hear it. The original title was One Horse Open Sleigh written by James Lord Pierpont in 1857. Supposedly it was originally a drinking song written in the Simpson Tavern in Medford, Massachusetts and included some rather racy verses about getting drunk, falling off the sleigh and being laughed at while sprawled out in the snow! The song is now called...you guessed it...Jingle Bells, and these days it is more associated with Christmas than with drunken Thanksgiving-time revelry.

I hope you all enjoyed this little stroll through Thanksgiving past, present and quirky odd facts as you recover from your food hangovers and Black Friday shenanigans.

Thanks for reading and Happy Thanksgiving!

If you enjoyed this post and would like to read more of my posts with a similar vibe, check out November Musings, October – a Time for Ghost Stories, & The Wild Horses of Assateague Island.