Thanksgiving Trivia Questions70 Answers, 7 Themed Rounds

1621 — The Pilgrims landed in 1620 and, after a brutal first winter, celebrated their first successful harvest in autumn 1621 at Plymouth, in present-day Massachusetts.

The Wampanoag — About 90 Wampanoag men attended with their leader — nearly twice the number of surviving colonists. The Wampanoag had lived in the region for thousands of years and made the colony's survival possible.

Massasoit — Massasoit — a title meaning great sachem — negotiated the alliance with Plymouth that held for decades. Powhatan led a different confederacy in Virginia; Sitting Bull lived 250 years later.

Squanto — Tisquantum, called Squanto, had been kidnapped and taken to Europe years earlier, where he learned English. Returning home, he found his people wiped out by disease — and became Plymouth's essential interpreter and guide.

The Mayflower — The Mayflower carried 102 passengers for 66 days. Its companion ship, the leaky Speedwell, had to turn back — forcing everyone onto one crowded vessel.

Abraham Lincoln — Lincoln fixed a national Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November in the middle of the Civil War, casting it as a day of national healing. Washington had proclaimed one-off days of thanksgiving, but no annual holiday.

Sarah Josepha Hale — Hale — who also wrote Mary Had a Little Lamb — lobbied five presidents over 17 years before Lincoln acted in 1863. She is remembered as the Godmother of Thanksgiving.

Franklin D. Roosevelt — FDR moved it up to stretch the Christmas shopping season during the Depression. Critics called it Franksgiving, half the states refused to switch, and Congress settled the matter in 1941: the fourth Thursday of November.

Three days — Colonist Edward Winslow's letter — one of only two firsthand accounts — describes three days of feasting, fowling, and games between the colonists and their Wampanoag guests.

Virginia — Settlers at Berkeley Hundred on the James River held a thanksgiving service in 1619 — two years before Plymouth. Texas and Florida press even earlier claims from Spanish expeditions. Massachusetts keeps the parade anyway.

Pumpkin pie — The colonists had no wheat flour, butter, or ovens for pie. Pumpkins and squash were likely stewed instead. The documented menu: five deer brought by the Wampanoag, wildfowl, corn, and probably seafood.

Campbell's — Home economist Dorcas Reilly created it to promote cream of mushroom soup. Campbell's estimates it now appears on tens of millions of Thanksgiving tables — Reilly's original recipe card was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002.

Bounce — Ripe cranberries bounce thanks to internal air pockets — growers literally use bounce tests. Those pockets are also why cranberries float in the flooded bogs at harvest.

Wisconsin — Wisconsin produces roughly 60 percent of the US crop, with Massachusetts — the historic heartland — second. About 20 percent of all cranberries eaten annually in America are consumed at Thanksgiving.

A marshmallow company's recipe booklet — A 1917 booklet commissioned by Angelus Marshmallows put marshmallows on sweet potatoes to sell more marshmallows. The marketing gimmick became a century-old family tradition.

Dressing — Technically stuffing goes inside the bird and dressing bakes separately, but regionally the South says dressing regardless — often cornbread-based — while the North says stuffing. Pennsylvania Dutch country splits the difference with filling.

John Madden — Madden evangelized the Louisiana creation during Thanksgiving broadcasts, famously carving one with his bare hands on air and awarding turkey legs to players of the game.

The bigger piece and a granted wish — The furcula-snapping custom goes back through English tradition to the ancient Etruscans, who considered fowl oracular. Dry the bone first — a brittle bone snaps; a fresh one just bends.

Pumpkin — Pumpkin pie appears at the vast majority of American Thanksgivings, with pecan the great Southern rival and apple close behind. Libby's canned pumpkin — mostly grown around Morton, Illinois — supplies most of them.

The moist maker — Ross's sandwich features an extra slice of bread soaked in gravy in the middle — the moist maker. When his boss eats it, Ross has the meltdown that gets him tranquilized and put on leave from the museum.

1924 — Macy's employees — many of them immigrants proud of their new American holiday — staged the first parade in 1924, marching from Harlem to Herald Square.

Live animals from the Central Park Zoo — Lions, tigers, elephants and camels marched until 1927, when they frightened too many children and were replaced by the first giant balloons.

Felix the Cat — Felix inflated the tradition; Mickey Mouse followed in 1934. In the early years balloons were released into the sky at the parade's end, with rewards offered for their return.

Santa Claus — Santa's arrival at Herald Square officially opens the Christmas season — a role he has played since the very first parade in 1924, with only rare exceptions.

Snoopy — Snoopy debuted in 1968 and has flown in more parades in more versions — astronaut, aviator, ice skater — than any other character. His astronaut version returned to honor NASA anniversaries.

Rubber and helium were needed for World War II — Macy's deflated its balloons and donated 650 pounds of rubber to the war effort. The parade returned in 1945 and has run every year since.

Herald Square — The Herald Square store, opened in 1902, billed itself as the world's largest. The parade's final stretch down 34th Street is the backdrop for Miracle on 34th Street's opening scenes.

Detroit — America's Thanksgiving Parade in Detroit began the same year as Macy's. Philadelphia's parade is actually America's oldest, dating to 1920 — a fine dispute-starter at the dinner table.

George H. W. Bush — Presidents had received turkeys for decades — Truman is often wrongly credited with pardoning his — but Bush formalized the pardon in 1989, and every president since has continued it. The lucky birds retire to farms and universities.

Broadway shows and marching bands — Broadway casts perform outside Macy's before the balloons arrive, and high school and college marching bands compete years in advance for invitations — a pipeline that makes the parade must-watch for band families nationwide.

The Detroit Lions — Lions owner George Richards started the tradition to fill seats and landed a national radio deal that made it stick. Detroit has hosted on Thanksgiving every year since, apart from a break from 1939 to 1944.

The Dallas Cowboys — General manager Tex Schramm volunteered Dallas for a Thanksgiving game when no one else wanted the date. The gamble drew a record crowd and made the Cowboys the holiday's second fixture.

Three — Detroit hosts the early game, Dallas the afternoon game, and since 2006 a third prime-time game rotates among other teams — a full day of football between courses.

The Chicago Bears — The undefeated, defending-champion Bears beat the Lions 19-16 before 26,000 fans at the University of Detroit stadium — with thousands more turned away at the gate.

Yale — The Intercollegiate Football Association put its championship on Thanksgiving in 1876, and by the 1890s the Princeton-Yale Thanksgiving game in New York drew 40,000 people and defined the holiday for a generation.

Turkey leg — The turkey leg award went to the game's best players — sometimes a six-legged turkey appeared so more stars could share it. The tradition continued in Madden's honor after his death in 2021.

Turkey Bowl — Turkey Bowls range from touch football in the yard to organized alumni games that high school classes replay for decades — often the real main event before dinner.

Leon Lett — In a freak Dallas snowstorm, Lett slid into the live ball, letting the Dolphins re-kick and win. It remains one of the most replayed Thanksgiving moments — and Lett, a three-time champion, handles the infamy with grace.

Arlington — Nicknamed Jerry World for owner Jerry Jones, the stadium sits between Dallas and Fort Worth. Its 60-yard video board was the world's largest when it opened in 2009.

High school and college rivalry games — Thanksgiving rivalry games — some over a century old, like Boston Latin vs. English High — remain the oldest continuous football traditions in America, predating the NFL by decades.

A tom — Adult males are toms or gobblers; young males are jakes; females are hens. A drake is a male duck and a cob a male swan — classic wrong answers.

A poult — Poults hatch ready to walk within a day. A group of turkeys is a rafter — though flock gets you full credit at most dinner tables.

Snood — The snood hangs over the beak; the wattle hangs under the chin. Hens judge toms partly by snood length — and the snood flushes bright red when a tom is showing off.

Yes — in short, fast bursts up to about 55 mph — Wild turkeys fly powerfully over short distances and roost in trees at night. Heavy domesticated turkeys, bred for meat, generally cannot fly at all — the source of the myth.

A much more respectable bird — In a private letter to his daughter, Franklin called the eagle a bird of bad moral character and the turkey a much more respectable bird and a true original native of America. He never formally proposed it as the national symbol — that part is myth.

Turkey — Europeans confused the American bird with guinea fowl imported through Turkish merchants — turkey birds. The confusion went global: in France it is dinde, from d'Inde, meaning from India.

Almost exclusively males — The gobble is the tom's mating and territory call, audible a mile away. Hens communicate in clucks, purrs, and yelps — a vocabulary wild-turkey hunters study seriously.

Minnesota — Minnesota leads with roughly 40 million birds a year, with North Carolina its perennial rival for the crown. The National Turkey Federation estimates around 46 million turkeys are eaten each Thanksgiving.

Buffalo, New York — Buffalo's YMCA Turkey Trot, first run in 1896, is even older than the Boston Marathon, which began in 1897. Turkey trots nationwide now make Thanksgiving the biggest running day of the American year.

In trees — They fly up to roost at dusk, safe from coyotes and foxes. Seeing a dozen 20-pound birds settle into an oak at sunset is one of birding's stranger sights.

Toast, popcorn, pretzels, and jelly beans — Peppermint Patty invites herself and everyone else to Charlie Brown's, then explodes over the menu. Marcie brokers the peace: Thanksgiving is not about the food. The special still airs every November.

John Candy — John Hughes' odd-couple odyssey is widely called the greatest Thanksgiving movie ever made. Candy's Del Griffith — shower-curtain-ring salesman — is the performance of his career.

A raw turkey with sunglasses — In The One with All the Thanksgivings, Monica dances with the turkey on her head — and Chandler accidentally says I love you for the first time. Friends aired a Thanksgiving episode in nearly every one of its ten seasons.

WKRP in Cincinnati — In Turkeys Away (1978), station manager Mr. Carlson drops live turkeys from a helicopter as a promotion, with catastrophic results narrated live in a War of the Worlds pastiche. Routinely voted one of the funniest sitcom episodes ever.

The first Thanksgiving — Cast as Pocahontas in the saccharine pageant, Wednesday goes gloriously off-script, delivering a burn-it-down counter-history that has become the internet's favorite Thanksgiving clip.

The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade — Kris Kringle discovers the parade Santa is drunk and takes over the sleigh himself. The 1947 film shot real footage of the 1946 parade — making it a time capsule of the actual event.

Free Birds — Owen Wilson and Woody Harrelson voice the time-traveling turkeys. The film invented a hot-take ending: pizza becomes the new Thanksgiving tradition.

Brad Pitt — Pitt — then married to Jennifer Aniston — plays Will, co-founder of the high school I Hate Rachel Green Club. The episode is a perennial pick for the best Friends Thanksgiving.

Her oven breaks while her estranged family drives to dinner — April begs neighbors across her New York tenement to share oven time. The indie favorite earned Patricia Clarkson an Oscar nomination as April's dying, acid-tongued mother.

Slapsgiving — Marshall's slap bet with Barney produced multiple Slapsgiving episodes, complete with an original song. The countdown clock reveal remains one of the show's best-executed running jokes.

The fourth Thursday of November — Congress fixed the fourth Thursday in 1941, ending the Franksgiving confusion — in years when November has five Thursdays, the fourth and last are different days.

46 million — The National Turkey Federation's famous estimate — more than at Christmas and Easter combined. Total annual US turkey consumption runs about 16 pounds per person.

Around 3.5 million — Another 25-plus million typically watch on TV, making it one of the most-viewed annual broadcasts in America — bigger than most playoff games.

The day after Thanksgiving — Roto-Rooter reports a roughly 50 percent jump in calls on Black Friday — grease-clogged drains and overworked garbage disposals are the culprits. Pour the turkey fat in a can, not the sink.

The second Monday of October — Canadian Thanksgiving, tied to the earlier northern harvest, coincides with the US Columbus Day. Canadians have celebrated official Thanksgivings since 1879.

About 50 colonists and 90 Wampanoag — Only around 50 of the 102 Mayflower passengers survived the first winter. The Wampanoag guests outnumbered their hosts nearly two to one — a detail the storybook version usually leaves out.

1981 — Dozens of trained experts now answer more than 100,000 questions each season by phone and text. All-time classics include whether a frozen turkey can be thawed in a hot tub. It cannot.

Jingle Bells — James Lord Pierpont's 1857 One Horse Open Sleigh was reportedly composed for Thanksgiving festivities — the lyrics never mention Christmas at all.

One of the busiest travel days of the year — AAA regularly projects 50-plus million Americans traveling for the holiday, with the Wednesday crush and Sunday return the peak. It is also, famously, one of the biggest bar nights of the year — Thanksgiving Eve.

The Christmas shopping season — The name came from Philadelphia police describing post-Thanksgiving traffic chaos in the 1960s; retailers later rebranded it as the day ledgers go into the black. It kicks off the season our Christmas quiz covers from the other side.