The first Thanksgiving celebration lasted three days.
The Wampanoag chief invited to the first Thanksgiving feast was named Massasoit.
The first Thanksgiving took place in the fall of 1621.
The Pilgrims didn't use forks.
Only about one-third of the original colonists were Puritans.
In 1941, Congress passed a proclamation naming Thanksgiving a legal holiday to be observed on the fourth Thursday in November.
The Mayflower's crossing took 66 days.
It's unclear if the Pilgrims at turkey ate the first Thanksgiving. At the time, "turkey" meant any kind of fowl.
Evidence indicates that turkeys have been around for more than 10 million years.
Turkey eggs hatch in 28 days.
A baby turkey is called a "poult."
A mature turkey has about 3,500 feathers.
More than 45 million turkeys are consumed during Thanksgiving.
The average weight of a Thanksgiving turkey is 15 pounds.
The Mayflower weighed 180 tons.
The captain of the Mayflower was named Christopher Jones.
There were at least two dogs on the Mayflower.
The typical 15-pound turkey is 70 percent white meat and 30 percent dark meat.
Pilgrim children, boys and girls, wore linen or wool dresses up until the ages of seven or eight.
The Pilgrims never celebrated a second Thanksgiving.
Cranberries are also called "bounceberries."
Thanksgiving in Canada is celebrated on the second Monday in October.
A male turkey is called a "Tom." A female turkey is called a "hen."
The Mayflower was a merchant vessel. Before transporting the Pilgrims, the ship was in the wine trade, and before that, in the fish trade.
The pet food industry uses about 13 percent of U.S. turkey production.
The Pilgrims did not eat cranberry sauce at the first Thanksgiving.
In the typical Pilgrim household, adults sat down to dinner while the children waited on them.
A nest of turkey eggs is called a "clutch."
The "caruncle" is the reddish, fleshy growth on the head and upper neck of a turkey. The red, fleshy growth from the base of a turkey's beak that hangs down over the neck is called the "snood."
The first native Americans to introduce themselves to the Pilgrims were Samoset and Squanto.
Ninety-five percent of Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving.