Thanksgiving Trivia for Kids
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142 free Thanksgiving Trivia for Kids trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
45 free Thanksgiving Trivia for Kids questions with answers. This kids Thanksgiving trivia quiz is written for children aged roughly 8 to 12, with grown-ups welcome to play along. The questions cover the story of the first feast at Plymouth in 1621, the Mayflower and the Wampanoag, Squanto and the corn he taught the Pilgrims to grow, and the president who finally made Thanksgiving a national holiday. There is plenty of fun stuff too: what a baby turkey is called, how far away a gobble can be heard, why the New York parade once had zoo animals instead of balloons, which cartoon mouse got the first balloon, what Snoopy serves for dinner in A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, why cranberries float and where the wishbone actually comes from. Nothing scary, nothing grown-up. It works for a classroom warm-up, a car ride to grandma's or a table game before the pie. Every answer has been checked against an encyclopaedic or primary source and each question shows its citation once you have answered, so you can settle any arguments on the spot.
30 of 142 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Turkey is often blamed, without good evidence, for causing which after-dinner feeling?
Sleepiness
Sleepiness gets pinned on tryptophan in the turkey, but the bird holds no more of it than other poultry, and there is no evidence that it makes diners drowsy.
Q 02Canada's Thanksgiving holiday always falls on which day of the week?
Monday
Monday has been the fixed day since 1957; in the 1920s the holiday shared a Monday with Armistice Day, until the two were split in 1931 so that veterans had a day of their own.
Q 03Where did most of the Pilgrims live during their first winter in America?
On their ship
On their ship: the colonists stayed aboard through the winter, and sickness spread fast in the cold, crowded quarters before the survivors moved ashore in spring.
Q 04Pictures of the Pilgrims often show which item on their hats that they never really wore?
Buckles
Buckles were added by 19th-century artists; the Pilgrims' own estate records list red caps, violet coats and green gowns, not just the black and white of the pictures.
Q 05A baby boy born at sea during the Pilgrims' voyage to America was given which fitting name?
Oceanus
Oceanus Hopkins was born in mid-Atlantic; his father Stephen was the one passenger who had crossed before, and had been shipwrecked on Bermuda on the way to Jamestown.
Q 06Which president made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln proclaimed it in the middle of the Civil War, after magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale had spent years urging one president after another to name a single national day.
Q 07In the New York parade's early years, what happened to the giant balloons once the parade was over?
Released into the sky
Released into the sky, the balloons drifted off and the store paid a reward to whoever sent one back; the stunt was dropped after one wrapped itself around an aeroplane's wing in 1932.
Q 08What does a courting male turkey do with his tail to impress a hen?
Fans it out
Fans it out is right: a courting male spreads his tail into an upright fan, droops his wings until the quills rattle, and struts slowly past her.
Q 09Which animal, sent to President Coolidge for Thanksgiving dinner in 1926, became a White House pet instead?
A raccoon
A raccoon arrived from a supporter in Mississippi; Calvin Coolidge had no wish to eat it, so the family named her Rebecca and kept her at the White House.
Q 10Native Americans ate cranberries and also used them for which other purpose?
Dyeing cloth
Dyeing cloth: the juice was used to colour fabrics, and the fruit was also pounded with dried meat and fat into pemmican, a food that kept through the winter.
Q 11When two people snap the forked bone from a turkey's breast, what does the one with the bigger piece get to do?
Make a wish
Make a wish, in the usual version of a custom traced to the early 1600s; the bone itself only came to be called the 'wishbone' around 1860, named after the game.
Q 12Canada celebrates its own Thanksgiving in which month?
October
October it is, though only fixed since 1957: before then the date wandered, and Canada's first national Thanksgiving, in 1879, fell about a month later in the year.
Q 13Which NFL team has hosted a Thanksgiving Day game since 1934?
Detroit Lions
The Detroit Lions had only just moved to the city in 1934, so owner George A. Richards, a radio man, staged a holiday game to win fans from baseball's Tigers, and the fixture stuck.
Q 21Most turkeys raised on farms have feathers of which colour?
White
Most farm turkeys are bred white because the tiny pin feathers left after plucking are hard to spot on pale skin, so the dressed bird looks cleaner.
Q 22Which of these can wild turkeys do that farm turkeys mostly cannot?
Fly quickly
Fly quickly is right: wild turkeys are strong fliers for a quarter of a mile or so, while the biggest farm birds have been bred too heavy to leave the ground.
Q 23Squanto, who helped the Pilgrims, had earlier been kidnapped and sold in which European country?
Spain
Spain: he was sold at the port of Málaga, where local friars are said to have taken in some of the captives; he got home in 1619 to find his village wiped out by disease.
Q 14The bare skin on a turkey's head changes colour to show what?
Its mood
Its mood: a male's bare head and neck are flushed with blood, and the skin shifts between red, white and blue when he gets excited or shows off to a rival.
Q 15Before the Pilgrims hired it, the ship that took them to America had mostly carried barrels of what?
Wine
Wine was its usual cargo, along with cloth: it was a merchant ship never built for passengers, so the Pilgrims lived packed together on the gun deck.
Q 16What is a baby turkey called?
A poult
Poults can walk and leave the nest within a day of hatching, which is why turkey chicks are called precocial.
Q 17What is the tuft of stiff, hair-like feathers on a male turkey's chest called?
A beard
A beard keeps growing all through a male's life, so biologists use its length as a rough guide to his age; about one hen in ten grows a short, wispy one too.
Q 18The fleshy flap that hangs over a turkey's beak is called what?
The snood
The snood sprouts from the turkey's forehead, not from the beak itself, and droops down over the bill; on a strutting male it swells and stretches well past the tip.
Q 19Why do male wild turkeys gobble in spring?
To attract mates
To attract mates: a courting male gobbles to draw in hens and, with the same call, to warn rival males to keep their distance.
Q 20Where do wild turkeys usually spend the night?
In trees
Wild turkeys roost in trees, settling on high branches at dusk; sleeping up high in a group keeps them safer from predators that hunt after dark.
Q 24Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to catch eels and grow which crop?
Corn
Squanto showed the Pilgrims how to plant corn, burying fish in each hill as fertiliser, and where to catch eels; the 1621 corn harvest was the colony's first real success.
Q 25Sarah Josepha Hale, the woman who campaigned for a national Thanksgiving, also wrote which nursery rhyme?
Mary Had a Little Lamb
Hale's 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' was published in 1830, and her years of letters to presidents earned her the nickname 'Mother of Thanksgiving'.
Q 26In 1939, the US president moved Thanksgiving a week earlier to give people more time for what?
Christmas shopping
The 1939 move was meant to lengthen the Christmas shopping season; it caused such confusion that some states kept the old date, and Congress settled the matter two years later.
Q 27Which president signed the 1941 law that fixed the date of Thanksgiving for good?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it on 26 December 1941, ending two years of muddle that began when he moved the holiday himself and part of the country refused to follow.
Q 28Which president made pardoning a turkey an official yearly White House tradition in 1989?
George H. W. Bush
George H. W. Bush announced the pardon at the 1989 ceremony and every president since has repeated it; under Ronald Reagan the birds were already going to farms, but with no fixed ritual.
Q 29The first big New York City Thanksgiving parade in 1924 had live animals borrowed from where?
The Central Park Zoo
The Central Park Zoo lent bears, elephants, camels and monkeys for that first parade in 1924; it went so well that the store behind it promised next morning to stage it again.
Q 30Which cartoon character was the very first giant balloon in the New York Thanksgiving parade?
Felix the Cat
Felix the Cat arrived in 1927, when character balloons took the place of the live animals that had marched in the earliest parades, and balloons have been the main attraction ever since.