Thanksgiving Trivia

20 miles an hour !

Their hands, a spoon and a knife.
They did not have forks available for the dinner.

Benjamin Franklin named it after Thomas Jefferson when he would not allow it to be the national bird

Wampanoag

270 degrees.
It gives a whole new meaning to having eyes behind the head.
No wonder they are so hard to catch!

A poult

By looking up.

Potatoes

Truman

50%

Yes.
The US Air force found that out the hard way when they were trying to break the sound barrier. Whole fields of turkeys fell down dead from heart attacks.

Horn of plenty

Neil Armstrong

3 days

4 inches

The size of a car engine.
It has cracked 3 times over the years, each time getting smaller and smaller.

The Mayflower, but there were actually two ships!
The Mayflower and the Speedwell.
The Mayflower made it to North America but the Speedwell had to turn back.

In the early years in North America, the pilgrim kids did not go to school.
Parents had to teach their own children or get a neighbor to help.
On another note, they only took baths a few times a year!

Mexico and Central America

A Hen

Benjamin Franklin

3,500

Minnesota

A Wattle

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Israel

In the refrigerator

In 1620 the Puritans arrived on the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock.
After a year there number was ½ of the original, due to death.
Of these survivors, only 4 were adult women and 40% were children.
The survivors, thankful to be alive, decided to give a feast.

Governor William Bradford.
They were invited because they taught the Pilgrims to cultivate the land, thus making it possible for them to survive.

The average person on Thanksgiving consumes 4,500 calories throughout the entire day. Though keep in mind the "typical" calorie intake per day - it's only between from 2000 to 2500!

You may THINK it's the tryptophan kicking in, when really the amount of tryptophan in your turkey is far to little to make you tired. The main reason is the combination of the carbs you ate at dinner and the alcohol often consumed throughout the day!

know I look forward to the parade every year!
Though another fun fact is that the first character balloon in the parade was Felix the Cat in 1927

Literally and botanically speaking, the two are not related.
Yams are large, starchy, edible tuberous roots that can grow two to three feet long and weigh as much as 80 pounds.
They grow in tropical/subtropical countries and need eight to ten months of warm weather to mature.
The two words became entwined in our household vernacular partly through a publicity campaign.
Early in this century, sweet-potato promoters attached the word yam to the deep orange, moist-fleshed varieties and left the words sweet potato to the smaller, yellowish, dry-fleshed varieties.
Today it is common to find either or both words used in supermarkets, but whichever is used, what's on sale is the sweet potato.

The cranberry is a genuine Native American, Vaccinium macrocarpon, a member of the heath family and a relative of the blueberry and huckleberry. The Pequot Indians of Cape Cod called the berry ibimi, meaning bitter berry, and combined crushed cranberries with dried venison and fat to make pemmican.

The Pilgrims and those who followed appreciated the wild berries but did not start to cultivate them until 1816, when a bog was planted and tended in Dennis on Cape Cod. By then, American and Canadian sailors on long voyages knew they could eat cranberries to protect themselves from scurvy - making them a cranberry counterpart to British "limeys."

This tradition was started in 1934 by the Detroit Lions, when they played the Chicago Bears

The Plymouth settlers did not refer to themselves as "Pilgrims." Pilgrims are people who travel for religious reasons, such as Muslims who make a pilgrimage to Mecca. Most of those who arrived here from England were religious dissidents who had broken away from the Church of England. They called themselves "Saints"; others called them "Separatists." Some of the settlers were "Puritans," dissidents but not separatists who wanted to "purify" the Church. It wasn't until around the time of the American Revolution that the name "Pilgrims" came to be associated with the Plymouth settlers, and the "Pilgrims" became the symbol of American morality and Christian faith, fortitude, and family