Thanksgiving is a pretty straightforward Holiday. Pilgrim meets Indian…Indian invites hungry Pilgrim to dinner and there you have it….Thanksgiving a time for the family to come together in loving memory of the day the Indians saved the Pilgrims…
Not so fast weird things associated with Thanksgiving…..
The first Swanson frozen TV dinner….because of Thanksgiving….Retired 
Swanson executive Gerry Thomas said he came up with the idea after the company found itself with a huge surplus of frozen turkeys because of poor Thanksgiving sales.
The three small towns …Turkey, TX, Turkey Creek, La. and Turkey, N.C…each have fewer than 500 residents. However, the world’s largest man-made turkey is in Frazee, MN. Weighing in at over 5,000 pounds, and standing over 20 feet tall, ‘Big Tom’ is the largest man-made turkey in the world. The turkey has roughly 1,000 pounds of steel reenforcing its body, and there are an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 fiberglass feathers on the turkey.
Thanksgiving Eve is the largest ‘bar night’ of the year. Not only do towns see
an increase in population (mostly college students heading home to see their families for the vacation) but there’s a built-in hangover day on Thanksgiving…complete with lots of comfort food. It is one of the few chances each year that people get to reunite with childhood friends, most of whom have moved all over the country after high school.
The first meal that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ate on the moon was roasted turkey from foil packets. It wasn’t Thanksgiving, but turkey does have a special sort of American je ne sais quoi.
1924 marks the first year of the Macy’s Day 
Parade, which was formerly known as the Thanksgiving parade, held in Newark, New Jersey at Bamberger’s (a store). For the first three years of the parade in New York, instead of using floats, Macy’s used live animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo in the spectacle. Over a quarter million people watched the first parade.
There are about 250 million turkeys raised annually in the US…to put things in perspective, the population of Indonesia is just under 250 million people. Major turkey producers tell consumers to buy 1.5 lbs of turkey per person on Thanksgiving so that there’s enough to eat with dinner and then enough for leftovers.
The average Turkey Day reveller consumes up to 4,500 calories throughout the day. It takes 
eating 3,500 calories to equal one pound of fat. A 160-pound person would have to run at a steady pace for six hours, swim for seven and a half hours or walk 45 miles to burn off a 4,500-calorie Thanksgiving day food-fest. Green bean casserole was invented in 1955 by Campbell’s.
Although George Washington was the first to create a national day of thanksgiving, it didn’t become a national holiday (with a set date) until Lincoln officially made it the last Thursday of November. For the interim 74 years, each state scheduled its own Thanksgiving at different times. The original document that proclaimed the exact date of Thanksgiving was written by Secretary of State William Seward in 1863.
Jingle Bells was orginally a Thanksgiving song…The song was composed by
James Pierpont in 1857 for his Sunday school class’ Thanksgiving performance at their church. He wrote the song with simplicity in mind so that his students would have no trouble memorizing the tune. The song was so well-received at the Thanksgiving concert, that the children sang it again at Christmas..and that’s how it became associated with that holiday rather than Thanksgiving.
