<=Jake the Cat (on top of the refrigerator) – Is it done yet????
88% of Americans have turkey on Thanksgiving. No word on what the other 12% eat but the statistic did come from the National Turkey Federation….
Approximately 250 million turkeys are raised every year for this holiday and the biggest producer of the required bird is Minnesota. (Really???? that seems odd to me but ok.)
“Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.” Erma Bombeck
“My cooking is so bad my kids thought Thanksgiving was to commemorate Pearl Harbor.” Phyllis Diller
768 million pounds of cranberries are required to make the sauce for dinner….
Here’s what Thoreau said about cranberries: “There, too, I admired, though I did not gather, the cranberries, small waxen gems, pendants of the meadow grass, pearly and red…” And that’s the only quote about them I could find other than Ocean Spray promotional stuff and things from, or about, the Irish rock band The Cranberries.
The first meal eaten on the Moon was a turkey dinner, which Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin consumed…I’ve actually been in a conference room with Mr. Aldrin once, which was a thrill…we didn’t talk turkey (or Tang).
There were 4.4 multigenerational households in the US last year…by which the US Census Bureau means three generations or more. I currently live by myself (well, with two cats) but my daughters and my grandson will be here to eat turkey so for a few hours we’ll be multigenerational. Guess which generation washes the dishes?
The average person consumes 4500 calories on Turkey Day. Wow. But hey, who counts? (Other than the Calorie Control Council, which generated the statistic.)
Four places in the US are named after the turkey – one plain Turkey, two Turkey Creeks and an Upper and a Lower Turkeyfoot. don’t you wonder what would inspire a group of Town Elders to name their towns after a turkey’s foot? But wait – the cranberry has seven places named for it. Cranberry wins!
Sarah Hale, the author of “Mary Had A Little Lamb” campaigned for twenty years to create the national holiday of Thanksgiving before President Lincoln finally issued the declaration in 1863.
Pretty much everything we know about the actual “first Thanksgiving” comes from a paragraph in a letter that Edward Winslow wrote to a friend a month or so later and an account William Bradford wrote about twenty years later. Here’s an excerpt from Winslow’s letter (in modern spelling)*:
“…our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruits of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the Company almost a week…”
So they had leftovers too!
*Quote from a page on the website of Pilgrim Hall Museum . This Museum, opened in 1824, has Captain Miles Standish’s sword, Mr. Bradford’s Bible, a portrait of Mr. Winslow, a sampler made by one of the Captain’s daughters….
In conclusion, sending you my best wishes, whether Thanksgiving is a holiday today for you or whether you have a different celebration of similar type!
I’m thankful for all the Readers and Reviewers and Book Bloggers and my fellow authors, as well as everyone in the publishing community AND the independent publishing world…..
