newjerseynewsroom.com

BY BOB HOLT

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

If you happen to overeat on Thanksgiving, don't worry about it, you’ll have plenty of company.

About 736 million pounds of turkey meat were on Thanksgiving dinner tables in the U.S., last year, according to the National Turkey Federation. And going against long-held beliefs, National Geographic reports that scientists are claiming the amount of tryptophan contained in turkeys doesn’t cause your sleepiness later.

They blame alcohol ingested with dinner, the calories involved in a Thanksgiving dinner, and relaxing after stressful work schedules. They had no report on the effect of your in-laws.

Anyway, the first Thanksgiving dinner may have been held in 1621, but the holiday wasn’t a consistent tradition until about 70 years ago.

According to the Washington Post, in 1789, Washington made Thursday, Nov. 26, a Thanksgiving holiday, but only for that year. In 1863 President Abraham Lincoln made the fourth Tuesday in November a national holiday. By 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had moved Thanksgiving to the third Thursday of November in order to make the Christmas shopping season a little longer. Due to opposition to the move, two years later Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday in November.

And the tradition of pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey only dates back to 1989, with president George H.W. Bush’s first official Presidential turkey pardon. According to politicususa.com, an old story had circulated that President Abraham Lincoln had pardoned the first turkey in 1863.

The story says that Lincoln’s son Tad became so attached to a Christmas turkey that it was kept as a pet. Lincoln didn’t pardon the turkey, he just let his son keep the bird.

The Christian Science Monitor reported that on Wednesday, President Barack Obama pardoned two 19-week-old, 45-pound turkeys named Liberty and Peace, whose names were chosen from more than 100 submissions.