Interesting Facts about Thanksgiving Day - Fun and Important Pieces of Information

Are you looking for some interesting facts about Thanksgiving?

Thanksgiving is a time of year when people take a moment to pause and take stock in their lives. While it is often a time for family and friends to get together, to share memories and extend their gratitude to one another for whatever reason, too many people don't really know too many facts about Thanksgiving.

That doesn't mean that if a person doesn't know some facts about Thanksgiving that the holiday will mean any less to them, but it is still nice to know about these snippets of information. Our history, our culture, and our ability to understand where it is that we come from is important and shouldn't be taken lightly.

Here are some interesting facts about Thanksgiving that you may or may not have known about.

• The Pilgrims who landed in Plymouth were the first to celebrate Thanksgiving.
  
  
• The first Thanksgiving feast was organized in 1621 by the Pilgrim leader, Governor William Bradford. He invited the Wampanoag Indians to the feast with them.
  
  
• The first Thanksgiving feast lasted three days.
  
  
• The original national bird, which is the bald eagle, for the United States was almost the turkey, for its strength.
  
  
• Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday.
  
  
• The annual Macy's Day Thanksgiving parade started in the 1920's.
  
  
• Originally, Thanksgiving was celebrated on November 30th. In 1939, President Roosevelt moved it to the 23rd to extend the Christmas holiday shopping season.
  
  
• In 1941, a law was passed that made Thanksgiving take place on the fourth Thursday of November, so that all states would celebrate it on the same day.
  
  
• The Wampanoag Indians helped the Pilgrims survive their first winter in the New World. While only half of the Pilgrims survived, they had decided that showing their gratitude to the Indians was the right thing to do.
  
  
• The Pilgrims arrived in North America in 1620.
  
  
• New York was the first state in the Union to make Thanksgiving an annual custom. This occurred in 1817.
  
  
• Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving and is referred to with that name because that is the day when most retail stores finally move from operating in the red (at a loss) to being in the black (turning a profit).

While there are plenty more fun facts about Thanksgiving, these are just a few to get you started on thinking about what Thanksgiving meant to people through the years and how it came to become a national holiday.

Without the help of the Indians during their first winter in the New World, it has been argued that the Pilgrims would not have survived until spring. This fact makes what happened to the Indians all that much more tragic.

It should also make one take a moment and be grateful for the things that they do have in their life at this time. A person can struggle and feel as though the weight of the world is on his shoulders, but compared to what other people have gone through throughout history, it's easy to realize that there are many things to be grateful for. If you have other fun facts about Thanksgiving, do share them.

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