The truth about Turkey: Five Thanksgiving facts

Friday, October 9, 2015, 10:34 AM - We hope you're sitting down to a Thanksgiving dinner, or planning to soon.

It's got a good claim to being our tastiest national holiday (the cranberry sauce helps), but although now widespread, the origins of our holiday have a few weird twists and turns, from who did it first, to why turkeys are even CALLED turkeys.

Here's five things to know. 

We beat the Pilgrims to it (but maybe not the Spanish)

Americans look back with pride on the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock as the originators of their own Thanksgiving celebrations, in 1621.

But while we’re sure the Pilgrims were supremely grateful at having made it through the winter, and for the harvest, Canada’s own first Thanksgiving was celebrated much earlier on a totally different Rock … maybe.

For that, we have Martin Frobisher to thank. He was already an accomplished seaman (and privateer, a legal pirate for the English crown) before setting out on three voyages to find the Northwest Passage.

That’s not an easy trip (Many others perished seeking the same thing, including the Franklin Expedition), and Frobisher tried it three times, courting disaster each time.

Flush with what he thought was gold (later found to be iron pyrite, “fool’s gold,” the fleet on his third voyage made landfall for a ceremony of thanksgiving in 1578 (the thanks, in this case, presumably being given for not having died on the way there).

Traditionally, this is considered to be in Newfoundland, but this source says it may actually have been on the shores of what is now Frobisher Bay in Baffin Island (which we figure adds about +100 points to Canadian-ness).

(And anyway, it looks like a Spanish expedition at St. Augustine in Florida beat everyone to it in 1565, but we’ll pretend we don’t know anything about that).

It took awhile to figure out when exactly Thanksgiving was

From Frobisher’s celebration on the Rock (or maybe Baffin Island), it took quite some time for everyone to make up their minds on when to hold the official day, and it differed from region to region.

Although always incorporating its aspect as a harvest festival, most Thanksgiving days echoed back to Frobisher’s take as a time to give thanks for a specific event.

In 1763, for example, people in Halifax dedicated the day to the end of the Seven Years’ War, when Britain drove France out of most of its North American territories for good, ending an ongoing security threat for the Nova Scotian capital.

The month didn’t even seem to matter. In 1816, a thanksgiving feast was held in Upper Canada (present day Ontario) in June to celebrate the end of the wars with France. In February 1833, Lower Canada, now Quebec, hosted a Thanksgiving for the end of a cholera outbreak. In 1856, both Canadas celebrated the end of the Crimean War in June.

Canada sort of started to get a handle on the Thanksgiving situation in 1879, when November 6 of that year was proclaimed a national holiday. But even then, confusion reigned, with the day falling anywhere in October or November until 1921.

That year, it was combined with Remembrance Day, and the two celebrations remained paired until 1930, when Thanksgiving was moved to a Monday in October. It wasn’t until 1957 that the holiday was formally declared for the second Monday in October.

All that fuss just for a turkey dinner. Speaking of which…

The truth about turkeys

Appropriately for the Americas – which were mistaken for a totally different continent by the Europeans who encountered them – turkeys are an unintended symbol of major confusion.

If you’re wondering why they’re named after a country that is nowhere near their actual home, this explanation from NPR gives the rather wonky backstory. It seems when the birds were first imported to England, it was via merchants operating out of Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire of the Turks. Average folks buying it for a meal would have associated it more with the Turks rather than the little-known New World, and it stuck.

The other explanation: Explorers may have mistaken it for a version of a Guinea fowl from West Africa … often called Turkey coqs due to the Turkish merchants who traded it.

It’s an odd naming fate for a bird so deeply rooted in the Americas. Your thanksgiving meal has an evolutionary history of 11 million years (according to this source). 

It was domesticated in Mexico as early as 800 BC and in the southwestern U.S. by 200 BC (according to Discovery).

Aside from food, the Maya, Aztecs and other peoples prized them for their plumage and as part of religious rites, as did some of the peoples in North America. 

Some pre-contact U.S. peoples actually encouraged their numbers as a side-effect of the controlled forest burning used to make meadowlands for game.

NEXT PAGE: Cranberries were the original super food