Thanksgiving Fun Facts

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November 2026 Newsletter

Thanksgiving Fun Facts

The 1621 celebration in Plymouth, Mass. Lasted 3 days and included about 50 Pilgrims and 90 Wampanoag people.
President Lincoln officially proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863 and Congress fixed the date as the 4th Thursday of November in 1941.
Americans cook about 46 million turkeys each Thanksgiving.
The first frozen TV dinners were created by Swanson in 1953 using roughly 260 tons of unsold turkeys.
An estimated 502 million pumpkin pies are eaten on Thanksgiving Day alone.
The average Thanksgiving meal contains roughly 4,500 calories.
While John F. Kennedy was the first president to informally spare a turkey, George H.W. Bush began the official annual turkey-pardoning tradition in 1989.
The Butterball Turkey hotline answers over 100,000 cooking questions every November and December.