This Thanksgiving, millions of Americans will sit down at the table and gawk over all the goodies they are planning to cram in their gullet. The holiday might seem as familiar as singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" during the "Seventh Inning Stretch" or packing a finger in ice that was blown off by a firework on the Fourth of July. However, like all traditions based on history and passed down through the ages, its genesis and story has been morphed and changed to fit the times.


  • 1

    Thanksgiving wasn't always celebrated with massive eating binges


    Dick Luria, Think Stock Photo
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    The modern concept of Thanksgiving was invented by Sarah Josepha Hale


    Public Domain
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    The entire %22Pilgrims eating with the Indians%22 story is a complete fabrication

    Hale may have indirectly inspired a lot of what we now know as Thanksgiving, but as word spread of her push to make the holiday official and homemakers started whipping up her recipes around the holiday, the story behind it also got a little "whipped up." Even though Hale was inspired by the colonial passage about the grand meal, she makes no mention of the word "Pilgrim" in her petitions to the President or her magazine features or editorials. According to the book "The Turkey: An American Story," the only thing that comes close to a "Pilgrim" in her stories is an editorial that uses the phrase "The Pilgrim Fathers" to describe the people who helped organize the meal. Other newspapers and magazines latched on to the phrase and embellished the holiday's history. When it finally crept into school textbooks, the legend was born.

    Think Stock
  • 4

    Historians can't confirm the first Thanksgiving even happened


    Public Domain
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    Native Americans celebrate an %22Unthanksgiving Day%22 every year at Alcatraz

    The story of the fabled meal took on such a life of its own that it almost transformed history's view of the colonists' early settlements in America at the detriment of the Native American people and their land. In November of 1969, a small group of Native Americans staged an occupation of Alcatraz Island, the defunct prison in San Francisco Bay, to reclaim "The Rock" for their people and receive government funding to build a cultural complex and a university on their new nation. The movement soon attracted hundreds of supporters on the following Thanksgiving Day and lasted for 19 months until dwindling food supplies and scant electrical power drove most of the protesters away. (The final 15 were removed from the island by force.) An annual "Sunrise Gathering" or "Unthanksgiving Day" as it has been nicknamed has been held on the island every Thanksgiving since to commemorate the protesters' efforts to reclaim their heritage.

    Justin Sullivan, Getty Images
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    The Presidential turkey pardon didn't start with Truman


    Alex Wong, Getty Images
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    Not all turkeys %22gobble%22

    Every year around the holidays, kids draw hand outlines and cut them out of construction paper to make turkeys for the refrigerator, all of which have a large "GOBBLE!" written in a word bubble next to their "thumb-like" head. The truth is that only the male turkeys utter the familiar "gobble" sound. According to Field and Stream, male turkeys gobble in order to "assert dominance over one another, to stake out territories, to attract hens and as a reflex or 'shock gobble.'" So in reality, that drawing your kid made of the turkey "gobbling" is really just a picture of a proud male trying to get lucky before he becomes the main course.

    Justin Sullivan, Getty Images
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    Eating Thanksgiving turkey doesn't actually make you sleepy

    When your Uncle Morty passes out at the Thanksgiving Day dinner table after ingesting an entire quarter of turkey and a bottle of wine, the family is often apt to blame it on the tryptophan in the turkey. Thanks to science, however, you know that Uncle Snoozy is really out cold because of the booze (and most likely because he's an alcoholic). While it's true that "purified tryptophan" can make someone sleepy, National Geographic says that the trytophan in turkey isn't powerful enough to put someone to sleep. Tryptophan needs to be ingested on an empty stomach to work as a sleep inducer and even then, the amino acids in the protein are more likely to reach the brain before the tryptophan can take effect. In fact, turkey isn't "unusually high in tryptophan" compared to other foods such as beef or soybeans. No wonder we're so sleepy after a tofurkey binge.

    Joe Kohen, Getty Images
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    The invention of the 'TV Dinner' came from Thanksgiving

    It's important to recognize that not everyone out there will get to enjoy the big, high calorie, cardiac arrest-inducing Thanksgiving dinner that inspires Normal Rockwell paintings and vague feelings of regret. Instead, they'll be lucky to have a frozen turkey dinner roasting in the microwave. Even this staple of American cuisine came from the hallowed Thanksgiving tradition. According to Gourmet Magazine, when the frozen-food company C.A. Swanson & Sons got stuck with 260 tons of turkeys, a salesman got the brilliant idea to freeze the meat along with other side dishes in a foil tray that Pan Am Airlines was testing to serve meals on their flights. The salesman "borrowed" one of the trays and suggested that the tray feature a full Thanksgiving dinner. The first "TV Brand Frozen Dinner" sold in 1954 for 98 cents and came with turkey, cornbread stuffing, peas and sweet potatoes. A dessert was added in 1960.

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    Libby's canned pumpkin pie filling isn't actually made from pumpkin

    Of course, what's a Thanksgiving meal without dessert? Libby's, a division of Nestle, seems to have a strange monopoly on the pumpkin pie filling market, but the reason why is even stranger. The "pumpkin" they use to create their traditional pie filling is a special strain they created called "The Select Dickinson" that actually is more closely related to a squash than a traditional pumpkin. It looks nothing like the bright orange pumpkins used to make Jack-o-Lanterns and decorate Thanksgiving displays -- it's actually tan on the outside with an orange flesh to give the filling its traditional color. It's also sweeter than the typical orange pumpkin and produces more "meat" for its filling. Also that Cool Whip topping? It's not actually made from cream.