The PIA Western Alliance and its staff and management wish all of you a wonderful and happy Thanksgiving.
Insurance aside, few of us have much on our minds this week but Thanksgiving and the upcoming holidays. This issue of Weekly Industry News will have the usual batch of insurance stories but we thought we’d begin with some fun facts about what some consider to be the best of all of the — some say way too many — national holidays.
These come our way via the educational website, WorldStrides.
The first fact involves the first Thanksgiving. While we are pretty positive they didn’t actually called it, Thanksgiving, the celebration happened in 1621. It lasted three days and there were 50 Pilgrims and 90 Wampanoag Indians present.
Oddly, only five women attended. No one knows for sure but the Weekly Industry News editor suspects their invite may have come because they had cooking skills. Oh, and turkey wasn’t on the menu. The site says the three days of eating featured venison, duck, goose, oysters, lobster, eel, and fish.
Maybe some pumpkins were there for the eating and a few cranberries. But the pumpkin didn’t make it to pies and the cranberries weren’t in the form of a sauce.
Most of you already know that President Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday on October 3, 1863. What you may not know is that some historians believe the 1621 meal was sometime in mid-October.
Anyway, Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday after being pushed to do so by Mary Had a Little Lamb writer, Sarah Josepha Hale. It took her 17 years of pestering U.S. presidents to get the job done.
The first U.S. president to pardon a turkey wasn’t Harry Truman as legend has it. He was the first to receive a ceremonial turkey from the National Turkey Foundation. Truman promptly cooked the poor bird and had it for dinner.
President John Kennedy is credited as the first to let a gobbler go.
The United States has four towns named Turkey. They’re in Turkey, Arizona, Turkey, Texas, Turkey, Louisiana and Turkey, North Carolina.
When it comes to eating, the average person consuming a Thanksgiving dinner gobbles down 4,500 calories. And many of those meals are incredibly tasty because of the Butterball Turkey Hotline. Butterball puts in into action every November and December. The hotline answers over 100,000 questions annually.
And what Thanksgiving Day festivity would be complete without football. The first Thanksgiving football game was between Princeton and Yale. It wasn’t televised. While some younger — and uneducated kids might think so — TV wasn’t invented in 1876.
The first National Football League game was in 1920. It, too, was not televised. There used to be there was just two games. One between the Detroit Lions and another team, and a second game between the Dallas Cowboys and another team.
Football is so popular, game demand is there, and the advertising dollars are irresistible, so a third game from two random teams was started in 2006.
Lastly, more of us will be traveling this year than last year. Estimates are that 54 million people will hit the highways, up 4.8% from 2022.
Source link: WorldStrides — https://bit.ly/3sLKBea
