There are a few curious facts about Thanksgiving. This celebration is very old, but we are sure that today you will learn a couple of absolutely new things about this holiday.

Here is what you need to know.

1. When was it announced to be an official celebration?

Thanks to Abraham Lincoln we now officially celebrate Thanksgiving. Nowadays it is an official holiday. In 1863 Abraham Lincoln, who was then the president of the United States of America, announced this day to be an official holiday. The president was inspired by magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale. The lady sent a message to the president in which she asked Lincoln to proclaim Thanksgiving an official holiday. Lincoln found the editor’s idea quite reasonable and followed her advice. Since then Thanksgiving has been a national holiday in the US. Every year thousands of people celebrate Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November. That’s when people express their gratitude for life, nature and good fortune.

2. What did people eat during Thanksgiving?

Only few of us know that there was no turkey on the first day of the celebration. The first time when people celebrated Thanksgiving was in 1621. The holiday lasted for three days. Everybody wanted to express their gratitude for the harvest – tribes, settles from other countries and pilgrims ate absolutely different foods from those we have nowadays on this day. As a rule, their meals consisted of shellfish, corn and deer meat. And turkey was not part of their menu.