(WYTV) – The average American will eat about 4,500 calories on Thanksgiving Day — that’s 3,000 for the meal and 1,500 for snacking.
The song “Jingle Bells” was first written as a Thanksgiving song.
While we usually regard the pilgrim celebration at Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts in 1621 as the first American Thanksgiving, there are 12 claims to where the “first” Thanksgiving took place: two in Texas, two in Florida, one in Maine, two in Virginia and five in Massachusetts.
The turkeys we see in Thanksgiving pictures and advertisements are not the same as the domestic turkeys we eat at Thanksgiving. Domestic turkeys usually weigh twice as much and are too large to fly.
The average long-distance Thanksgiving trip is 214 miles, compared with 275 miles over Christmas and New Year’s.
A Thanksgiving dinner usually features cranberries, but the Native Americans didn’t eat them. They used cranberries to treat arrow wounds and to dye clothes.
The first Thanksgiving football game was in 1876.
The Snoopy balloon has appeared in the Thanksgiving Day Parade more often than any other character.
Only male turkeys gobble, and that’s why we call them gobblers.
Long before the Pilgrims, native Hawaiians celebrated the longest Thanksgiving in the world, Makahiki, which lasted four months, from November through February. During this time, nobody went to work, and nobody went to war.
Stuffing or dressing? People who cook the bread sidedish separately from the turkey or live in the South tend to call it dressing. People who cook it in the turkey or live elsewhere, tend to call it stuffing.
On average, it takes about 7 hours to cook a Thanksgiving dinner. People spend about 16 minutes eating it.
