Quick Answers to Burning Questions About Thanksgiving
Why did the Pilgrims wear those huge hats? How come there is a parade of enormous balloon animals on TV? And what is with all these wacky once-a-year dishes (Funyuns on a green bean casserole)?! Thanksgiving brings people together all right — in confusion over all the quirky traditions of the day. Fear not, moms and dads. Yahoo Parenting has done the research on a few typical kid queries so you don’t have to. There’s already enough on your plate this holiday.
1. Why is it always on a Thursday?
In Colonial times, this was the typical day for lectures, reveals the Old Farmer’s Almanac, North America’s oldest continuously published periodical, which began in 1792. “Ministers [gave] a religious talk each Thursday afternoon. This practice may have contributed to the Thursday Thanksgiving tradition.” In 1789, President George Washington declared Thursday, Nov. 26, a “Day of Publick Thanksgivin,” according to the National Archives. Then in 1863, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of Thanksgiving to be held the last Thursday of November. After Franklin D. Roosevelt moved it up a week in 1939 to extend the Christmas shopping season (seriously), Congress passed a joint resolution in 1941 declaring the federal Thanksgiving Day holiday to be held on the fourth Thursday in November forevermore.
(Photo: AP Photo/Press of Atlantic City Photo/Dale Gerhard)
2. Can turkeys fly?
Yes, wild turkeys can fly. Turkeys can run at speeds up to 25 miles per hour and can fly up to 55 miles per hour, according to the National Wild Turkey Federation, which reports that the bird is “very mobile.” The reason we hardly ever see them in the air is that wild turkeys rarely fly more than 100 yards (to escape predators) and domestic turkeys can’t flap their wings fast enough to stay up. University of Montana biology professor Ken Dial tells the Washington Post ”Turkeys spend 99.999 percent of their lives on their legs.”
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(Photo: Johnny Autry/Offset)
3. Why do people have to eat turkey on Thanksgiving?
The simple answer, of course, is that you don’t have to. “In fact, the original Pilgrims didn’t eat turkey,” Pilgrims of Plymouth author and educator Susan E. Goodman tells Yahoo Parenting. “All we know for sure is that they ate deer. A lot of the food we think of as traditional for Thanksgiving only became tradition in the mid-1800s because that’s what people ate then. There were no cranberries, turkey, apples, celery, stuffing, potatoes or corn.” Since these traditions were just made up 150 years ago, why not make your own traditions if turkey doesn’t symbolize Thanksgiving for you? The important thing, Trudi Trueit, author of the children’s book Thanksgiving, tells Yahoo Parenting, isn’t what you eat “but that you share your good fortune and blessings with others.”
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Photo: GraphicaArtis/Corbis
4. Why do we celebrate the Pilgrims when they stole Native Americans’ land?
”This is a tough one,” acknowledges Goodman. “Originally it wasn’t a holiday or about Pilgrims at all. Abraham Lincoln created it as a day to just give thanks.” She suggests simply telling kids bothered by the idea of honoring Pilgrims, “That’s what we could celebrate, the opportunity to give thanks.” You could also comfort children with the fact that the first feast between the Wampanoag and Pilgrims was a gesture of friendship, the educator adds. “It was about coming together. Sometimes even the best of intentions go awry, as history shows, but what’s important to remember about that first feast is that they were trying to create a relationship between them. It was a meaningful, multicultural event.”
Photo: Gary Hershorn/Corbis
5. Why is there a big parade on TV?
It’s tradition! The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has been drawing crowds in New York City since it began in 1924 and nationwide since 1939, when NBC first broadcast the festivities. Fun fact: It began as a Christmas parade. “R.H. Macy and Company was a company of immigrants, who were thankful for the opportunities that America and New York City gave them,” write Robert M. Grippo and Christopher Hoskins in their history of the event, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. “They decided to give thanks and celebrate their good fortune with a tradition rooted in the festivals of their homelands: parades.” The first year, employees walked dressed as clowns, knights and cowboys. “Marching bands and animals from the Central Park Zoo accompanied the parade’s first floats: The Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe, Miss Muffet and Red Riding Hood,” reports Time. “The event attracted a quarter of a million people.”
(Top photo: Melissa Ross/Stocksy)
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