Turkey Day
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93 free Turkey Day trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free Turkey Day trivia questions with answers. Turkey Day trivia lives in two places on BrainPickle. This page is the shorter set; the main quiz is Thanksgiving trivia, with our deepest question pool on the topic and a source behind every answer.
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Q 01Which Patuxet man taught the Plymouth colonists to catch eel and grow corn?
Squanto
Squanto (Tisquantum), a Patuxet who learned English after being kidnapped and sold in Spain in 1614, showed the colonists how to plant corn with fish and where to catch eels.
Q 02How many days did the 1621 harvest celebration at Plymouth famously last?
Three
Three days: Edward Winslow's 1621 letter says the colonists 'entertained and feasted' about ninety Native men for three days, and that the guests went out and killed five deer for the table.
Q 03Which 19th-century editor tirelessly campaigned for Thanksgiving to become a national holiday?
Sarah Josepha Hale
Sarah Josepha Hale, the Godey's Lady's Book editor who also wrote 'Mary Had a Little Lamb', lobbied governors and presidents for 17 years before her letters finally won a national proclamation in 1863.
Q 04Which president began the unbroken yearly run of national Thanksgivings by proclaiming one for the last Thursday of November?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln proclaimed it on October 3, 1863, asking Americans in the middle of the Civil War to remember its widows and orphans, and presidents have proclaimed the day every year since.
Q 05In which Dutch city did the Pilgrims live before sailing for America?
Leiden
Leiden: the congregation settled there in 1609 and stayed about eleven years, then left partly because their children were growing up more Dutch than English.
Q 06Which 1796 volume was the first known cookbook written by a citizen of the United States?
American Cookery
American Cookery, published in Hartford by Amelia Simmons, turned away from the British cookbooks Americans had relied on by cooking with native cornmeal, as in its recipe for johnny cake, or hoe cake.
Q 07Which soldier did the Pilgrims hire as their military captain before sailing on the Mayflower?
Myles Standish
Myles Standish, who had served with English troops in Holland, organised the colony's defences, and Plymouth's militia re-elected him as its commander for the rest of his life.
Q 08What does the cornucopia, often seen as a Thanksgiving decoration, traditionally symbolize?
Abundance and prosperity
Abundance and prosperity: in one Greek myth the infant Zeus broke a horn off the goat Amalthea, who had nursed him, and it poured out endless food and drink, hence the 'horn of plenty'.
Q 09On which day is Thanksgiving celebrated in Canada?
The second Monday in October
The second Monday in October was fixed by a 1957 proclamation; the first annual Thanksgiving, in 1879, fell in November, and from 1921 to 1930 the holiday shared a day with Armistice Day.
Q 10What is Germany's traditional harvest festival, often likened to Thanksgiving, called?
Erntedankfest
Erntedankfest, literally 'harvest thanks festival', is a church celebration held around early October, when altars are piled with produce that is often given afterwards to the poor.
Q 11Which sachem made a 1621 peace treaty with Plymouth and came to its harvest feast with about ninety men?
Massasoit
Massasoit, the Pokanoket sachem, sealed the treaty in March 1621; at the feast his men went out and killed five deer, which they gave to the colony's leaders.
Q 12Which state kept marking Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November until 1956, long after Congress fixed the date?
Texas
Texas: Congress fixed the fourth Thursday in a law signed in December 1941, but Texas kept the old last-Thursday rule, which split the two dates whenever November had five Thursdays, as in 1956.
Q 13What is an adult male turkey commonly called?
A tom
A tom: adult males are also called gobblers, after the gobbling call they make in spring to announce themselves to females and to rival males.
Q 21Which berry do growers harvest by flooding their bogs so the fruit floats to the surface?
Cranberry
Cranberry: the vines grow on drained beds, not in water; growers flood them for the autumn harvest, when a machine knocks the fruit loose and the floating berries are corralled and lifted out.
Q 22Which group lobbied President Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving a week earlier in 1939?
Retailers
Retailers: with the holiday due on November 30, a dry-goods trade group warned that a short Christmas shopping season would hurt the recovery, but about half the states refused to move the date.
Q 23Which Roman goddess was often shown holding a cornucopia and a ship's rudder?
Fortuna
Q 14Under what name have Native Americans gathered in Plymouth, Massachusetts every Thanksgiving since 1970?
A National Day of Mourning
A National Day of Mourning began in 1970, when Frank James was invited to speak at a Mayflower anniversary dinner, had his speech rejected, and delivered it on Cole's Hill above Plymouth Rock instead.
Q 15In what city is the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade primarily held?
New York City
New York City has hosted the parade since 1924, with one break: from 1942 to 1944 it was called off because the rubber in its balloons was needed for the war effort.
Q 16Which Native American tribe joined the first recorded Thanksgiving at Plymouth Colony in 1621?
Wampanoag
Wampanoag: an epidemic shortly before 1620 had wiped out their village of Patuxet, and the English built Plymouth on its empty site.
Q 17Which NFL team has hosted a Thanksgiving game almost every year since 1934, missing only 1939 to 1944?
Detroit Lions
The Detroit Lions: owner George A. Richards launched the tradition in 1934, persuading NBC radio to carry his team's game against the Chicago Bears nationwide, and the Lions have played every Thanksgiving since 1945.
Q 18Which Thanksgiving side dish is a mashed root vegetable baked under a brown sugar topping?
Sweet Potato Casserole
Sweet potato casserole: its main ingredient is often sold as a 'yam', but the supermarket 'yam' is nearly always a sweet potato, and true yams are a separate plant, only distantly related.
Q 19Which second ship was meant to sail with the Mayflower but was left behind as unseaworthy?
Speedwell
Speedwell: the leaky Speedwell twice forced both ships back to port, so the Mayflower finally sailed alone from Plymouth, England on September 6 and lost the mild-weather crossing.
Q 20Which shopping day after Thanksgiving got its name from a retail trade group's 2005 press release?
Cyber Monday
Cyber Monday: Shop.org, part of the National Retail Federation, coined it to promote online shopping, billing the Monday as one of the year's biggest web shopping days when it then ranked only twelfth.
Fortuna, goddess of luck, was also shown with a ball or a wheel, and her turning Wheel of Fortune became the medieval emblem of how quickly luck can change.
Q 24Which U.S. President formalized the tradition of pardoning a turkey annually for Thanksgiving?
George H.W. Bush
George H.W. Bush made the pardon a fixed part of the ceremony in 1989, his first year in office; Ronald Reagan had joked about pardoning a turkey in 1987, during the Iran-Contra affair.
Q 25A Thanksgiving turkey trot billed as North America's oldest continuous footrace has run since 1896 in which city in upstate New York?
Buffalo
Buffalo: the YMCA Turkey Trot was first run on Thanksgiving 1896, a year before the first Boston Marathon, and has been held every year since, through two world wars and two pandemics.
Q 26Which president issued the first presidential Thanksgiving proclamation, at the request of Congress?
George Washington
George Washington issued the proclamation on October 3, 1789, naming Thursday, November 26 as a day of public thanksgiving; it was a one-off rather than the start of an annual holiday.
Q 27Which part of a roast turkey was long known in England as the 'merrythought'?
The wishbone
The wishbone: 'merrythought' dates from the early 1600s, when the winner of the pull was said to marry first or get a wish; the word 'wishbone' appeared only in the mid-1800s.
Q 28Which agreement did the Pilgrims write and sign before going ashore?
The Mayflower Compact
The Mayflower Compact was signed by 41 men aboard ship after some passengers argued that, having landed outside their patent, no one had the power to command them.
Q 29What type of pie is most commonly associated with Thanksgiving dessert?
Pumpkin pie
Pumpkin pie has English roots: 'pumpion pie' recipes appear in 17th-century English cookbooks, while early colonists more likely ate their pumpkin stewed or as a savoury soup.
Q 30What did the first Macy's parade feature instead of the giant character balloons that came later?
Live zoo animals
Live zoo animals: some 25 of them, bears and elephants included, were borrowed from the Central Park Zoo to walk the 1924 route, and character balloons took their place from 1927.