Thanksgiving Quiz
The 1621 feast lasted three days, and turkey may not have been the main dish.
A Thanksgiving quiz with answers about the history and customs of the holiday: who was at the first feast, who campaigned for a national day, and how football, shopping and frozen dinners became part of it.
Did you know?
- Ripe cranberries bounce. A good berry contains small pockets of air, and growers have long sorted the fruit by letting it drop onto a board: sound berries spring over a barrier while soft ones do not. The fruit was once nicknamed the bounceberry.
- Since 1981 one turkey company has run a telephone helpline every November and December, staffed by experts who answer questions from nervous cooks. It receives tens of thousands of calls each season, many about how to thaw a frozen bird in time.
- Breaking the turkey's wishbone is one of the oldest customs at the table. Two people pull the dried bone apart, and the one left holding the longer piece makes a wish. The practice can be traced back through England to ancient Italy.
How Thanksgiving became a national holiday
Days of thanks after a good harvest were common in many cultures long before 1621, and the settlers at Plymouth did not think of their feast as the start of a tradition. It was largely forgotten for two centuries. Individual American states held their own thanksgiving days on different dates, mostly in the Northeast, and the custom was almost unknown in the South. A New England magazine editor began to argue in the 1840s that the whole nation should share one day.
One day for the whole country
In 1863 President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November, and his successors repeated the proclamation each year. In 1939 the date was moved a week earlier to lengthen the Christmas shopping season, which caused such confusion that some states celebrated twice. Congress settled the matter in 1941 by fixing the fourth Thursday of November.
What is on the table
The classic meal is built from foods native to the Americas: turkey, cranberries, sweet potatoes, corn and pumpkin. Pumpkin pie as it is known today needs an oven and refined sugar, so it could not have been served in 1621. Regional touches vary widely, from cornbread stuffing in the South to wild rice in the upper Midwest and oyster dressing along the coasts. Americans eat around forty-six million turkeys for the holiday each year.
A long weekend on the move
Thanksgiving is the busiest travel period of the American year, as families gather from across the country. The following day has become the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season. Many communities also hold a morning fun run, nicknamed a turkey trot, and volunteers serve free meals to people in need, a custom as old as the holiday itself. A giant parade of balloons through New York has been broadcast on television since the 1940s.